A Future Without Books? - A Review Of BBC1's 'Books: The Last Chapter?'

The worst part of this TV programme on BBC1 was nothing in the show itself. It was the title and pre-show publicity. The title, 'Books: The Last Chapter?' embodies everything I hate in the e-books versus physical books debate.

'A book is an instrument for the transmission of ideas,' said Bob Stein, from The Institute For The Future Of Books. It's this single fact that is often overlooked by the Luddites who genuflect and predict the end of the world when envisaging a future without the printed page.

The rise of e-books does not mean the end of 'books'. E-books are books. It's not hard to fathom, it's there in the term.

Alan Yentob did a good job in presenting the current climate and putting it into its historical context. There is no global warming situation for bibliophiles, just a natural evolution.

I sniffed an interesting parallel between the present day situation and the moment when William Caxton invented the printing press. It could be argued that it was at this point in history that books as objects lost their true individuality. Before that, books were handwritten. Monks were probably decrying this advance in the same way Julian Barnes called for the 'protecting' of the physical book.

But this particular debate is about books as objects. It's not about content, which is what truly matter. As Theo Gray, of Touch Press, put it: 'There will always be people who fetishise printed books.' The show humorously illustrated this in the form of an interview with Rachael Morrison, a librarian at the Museum For Modern Art who has the responsibility of sniffing books and describing their aroma in a log.

The humour continued when Yentob interviewed three people who embodied the traditional publishing values – agent, Ed Victor; publisher, Gail Rebuck; and author, Ewan Morrison. The show sat them down in a quirky, surreal, Georgian living room, with a portrait of a rabbit with huge breasts hanging over them, as if to emphasise their antiquated trade. Their views weren't as unenlightened as the show wanted them to be. But there was an uneasy guffawing when they all agreed that they needed each other.

Books take a year to write, said Morrison. Publishers remain as curators, said Rebuck. Agents are needed to protect writers, said Victor. Now anybody involved in digital publishing could challenge all three statements. And if your name is Joe Konrath, John Locke, or Amanda Hocking, challenge them successfully on empirical grounds. In a year we could all be out of a job, said Morrison. In the upcoming age of the author-entrepreneur he might just be right.

One issue the book didn't address is the one that turned me on to the digital experience - e-ink. I don't like reading on a glaring screen. Over long periods of time my eyes tire. But with e-ink on devices such as the Kindle, Nook or Sony e-readers, the experience is comfortable - even more comfortable than reading paper.

The value of having not just 'a' book but all the books you want on you all the time was the major boon of the e-book revolution for Publishing Consultant, Mike Shatzkin. 'I have no physical sentimentality about the physical book at all,' he said. And neither did this TV show, which was a pleasant surprise.