TRUE electronic books have arrived at last. So why are we feeling sad?

Take a walk around your nearest library. Meander down its aisles and gaze at the incredible breadth of human experience contained within. Billions upon billions of characters, millions upon millions of words, a cornucopia of knowledge and emotion tightly bound inside thousands upon thousands of small rectangular entities known as books. Take a particularly battered book from a shelf. Feel its weight and its texture. Breathe in its slightly musty, evocative smell. Gaze at its cover and then flick it open. Start to read. And know, as it transports you, that you are not the first. For this lump of ink and paper, this chunk of wood and dye, has carried the minds of many others down the very path along which it now bears you. Wherever you are headed, you will not be going there alone.

Oi! What are you doing? Put that filthy thing down. Oh good god, don't tell me you smelled it? You freak. Why don't you read your books on a screen like the rest of us?

Pick up a book in 2020 and chances are you'll be subjected to that precise string of abuse. While present day humans are still clinging desperately to books like shipwreck victims to planks of wood, our future selves are busy consuming the tomes of the day via a one-size-fits-all electronic reader.

It's not as barmy as it sounds. The appeal of stuffing a library of books, iPod style, into one little gadget, is obvious. The problem to date has been that reading text on a screen for more than two minutes makes your eyes bleed. All that bright radiation streaming into your pupils is only marginally more relaxing than swallowing forks. But boffins have finally worked their way around the problem. E Ink is a weirdo system which simulates a physical page by moving tons of tiny black and white blobs around. They're proper little things whizzing about inside a plastic box, instead of pixels, so there's no real screen glare. Obviously the thought of a book with a USB port and a battery is mental, but never mind.

Waterstones, champion of traditional bookage, is embracing this new fangled beast with open arms by pimping the new Sony eReader. It stores 160 books - more with a Memory Stick - and does bookmarks, magnification, PDFs in black and white and even a spot of music storage. It turns almost 7,000 pages with a single charge, fills up its battery in two hours and comes complete with 100 copyright free classics preloaded.

Essentially, this device and its bedfellows are poised to topple one of the last bastions of analogue media. Musos sniffed when records were replaced and old school snappers berated digital photography, but this is a sea

Books may be archaic in this brave new world of ones and zeros, but we happen to quite like them. Especially the smell.