IF YOU HAVEN'T DONE THIS YET try searching YouTube for “middle ages tech support” and enjoy — I'm sure you will — the clip that comes up. No, I hadn't thought of Norway as a country famous for its humour either, but this short film of a medieval scholar puzzled by a new device, apparently known as “the book”, is spot-on.

I remembered it the other day when, commuting through the city, I saw — for the first time in my whole life — an actual person sitting on an actual train using one of those electronic-reading-device-thingies (I believe that is the technical term).

At first, glancing down, I thought that he was playing some antiquated video game, such as PacMan or Space Invaders. But then I realised he was reading. Alas, my stop was next, so my snooping was limited; I didn't get to see him “turn the page” or “close the book”. I didn't find out what he was reading either: The Faerie Queen? Dick Francis? Coincidentally, I had just seen Jeff Bezos of Amazon on the cover of Newsweek, touting the company's new electronic-reading-device-thingy, the already-sold-out Kindle.

I suppose that this will be under a lot of Christmas trees this year, rather than the more conventional volumes selected in the following pages — American trees, I should say, since it is not yet available in Britain. I watched the demo film, and it certainly looks pretty whizzy, less clunky, certainly, than its predecessors and able to download your books in under a minute. You can even make notes in the margins, they say.

You are probably not surprised to hear that I remain unconvinced, although I wish the Kindle all the best. It's not that I predict failure; it's just that I'm attached to the older technology of covers and paper and margins and type. I always will be. Well, a friend said, I suppose it would be great if you were going to the Antarctic or something. Yes, I thought: but there aren't a lot of places to plug things in on an icecap, and anyway, what if you just decided to read Oliver Twist (say) over and over again while you were down there? That would be no bad thing.

It's a shock, I know, to hear a books editor stand up for the book. But I note that the product overview for Kindle says nothing about what happens if you drop it in the bath.

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