Last night, more evidence of the speed with which the world is turning a corner. A play-reading circle that I belong to was doing J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. In the past, when I’ve turned up to these wine-fuelled evening gatherings with my laptop, I’ve been the only one who hasn’t printed out the text from the web, or else bought a copy of the play. This time round, a laptop, a Kindle and an iPad were already up-and-running when I arrived. As my fellow laptop-user opined, those of us with wires were starting to look old-fashioned.

What play to do next time? Someone wanted Shakespeare, so I suggested The Double Falsehood, an eighteenth-century play that may preserve parts of the lost Shakespeare/Fletcher play Cardenio. It has just been edited for the Arden Shakespeare, so the time is ripe. ‘Oh no, not a book we have to buy,’ came a reply, ‘my house is too full of books already. How can I get rid of my books?’

In the midst of the digital revolution everyone seems to be dreaming about weightless text. Can we have those wonderful words without their associated baggage, the costly pages, the ever-proliferating bookshelves and libraries and siloes that are needed to preserve them? It’s like the fantasy of the house without clutter, the kind of house you see in Sunday supplements: clean lines, glass, light. The risk is that, as the weight goes, the text goes too. Pictures, prefaces, footnotes, fonts, your feeling for what kind of a book this is, your sense of where you are and where you are going–all are liable to disappear in ereader editions.

Of course, the same thing often happens in print. When texts are repackaged for new markets, they lose a lot of the framing, ‘paratextual’ features that gave them meaning in their old locale; this adaptation to the environment is what keeps them alive. But sometimes even a great work of literature leads only a half-life when stripped of its original physical vehicle. Encountering a book in its first incarnation can be a revelatory experience: the very look of the thing, its unconscious cues, its body language, put in you in a frame of mind to appreciate it.

So it’s two cheers for the new technology. Or am I just a luddite?