Tomorrow night on BBC One, Alan Yentob’s documentary series Imagine continues with a look at the future of books in the digital age. It’s titled Books – The Last Chapter? and will feature the bookish opinions of a librarian, an agent, a publisher and authors such as Alan Bennett and Douglas Coupland. Apparently, they will also be smelling books, a practice I also engage in from time to time. As a regular buyer and reader of books, I am firmly in favour of the old-fashioned published work over its newfangled electronic equivalent. We never had that many books in my home when I was growing up but they did start to appear as I went through secondary school and I used to also read newspapers, comic books and magazines. As a young man who didn’t play sports, I tended to divide my time between reading and watching television. How the times have changed! I now own way more books than I’ll ever read, though I suppose books aren’t just for reading. I also buy magazines and newspapers even though their content is usually available for free on the internet. Of course, I read stuff on the internet as well and I’ve acquired a device recently that has actually made me reconsider my attitude to electronic reading
