For many writers, digital books are the scariest things to hit publishing since Stephen King.

They have created an atmosphere of uncertainty in the industry, with some hailing a new golden age of writing and reading, while others predict the death of the book.

Writing and publishing a book was traditionally a slow and complicated process. In the digital age, anyone can publish more or less anything, legally or illegally, at the push of a few buttons. I recently found an entire digitised copy of one of my own books on the internet. Someone had simply fed the book into a scanner, changed a few names, and posted the text on a website. Shutting this down took time that might have been better spent writing something and even now I suspect that plagiarised digital facsimile is still floating somewhere out in cyberspace, wearing a thin disguise.

So far, the book trade has escaped the trauma suffered by the music industry. Downloading a song has hitherto been a far easier physical process than laboriously downloading an entire book. That too may be changing. The latest electronic books can hold entire libraries and represent a vast improvement on the early e-books.

Optimists say that digital publishing could bring the joy of books to a vast new generation of readers. But unless copyright is adequately defended, and a way found to compensate writers adequately for digital book sales, then the pool of writers may start to dry up. Samuel Johnson once cynically observed that “no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money”. In fact, most writers do not require much money: just enough to be able to keep on writing.

In the saga of digital books, this alone is certain: the first chapter has only just begun.

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