yet again… last week we learnt that ebook sales are predicted to overtake physical book sales in 2018, although apparently all the figures are skewed by Amazon’s refusal to release sales figures for Kindle books. Then the Guardian ran a report on how Foyles, the world-famous bookshop on Charing Cross Road, has moved to new premises in the hope of continuing to sell serious numbers of physical books. (The online version comes with a rather nice time-lapse video).

Meanwhile the scholarly folks at SHARP, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, have been having a vociferous online discussion about whether their journal should accept books for review in electronic formats. The interventions have really run the gamut. Ebooks are inconvenient because they (sometimes) don’t have page numbers, or they don’t reproduce images well, or they don’t allow sufficiently easy access to notes; physical books are hopeless because they are so cumbersome, or because you have to keep on typing in the long urls they supply as footnote references. Ebooks are cutting-edge technology, set to replace the printed book just as the codex replaced the scroll; ebooks as we currently know them are anything but cutting-edge, and are just a stop-gap which will be replaced by something far better in the coming decades. We ought to have physical books to test-drive if physical books are what is being sold; we ought to accept ebooks so that we can point out the deficiencies of the format to authors, publishers and readers. The cat is clearly among the pigeons. Who knows what will be left when the feathers have stopped flying?