I’ve been contemplating the news that probably signals the slow demise of the hardback book – and the paperback can’t be far behind. Kindle e-books are outselling hardcover books by almost 50%, according to Amazon.

For the past three months, Amazon has sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 dead-tree books. Paperbacks are not included in these figures.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos:

"Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books—astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months"

This is probably a good thing. After all, we live on a speck of dust of finite size and dimension. With the printing presses having run for several centuries now, and given that there are some six billion of us filling its every nook and cranny with our "stuff" we’re bound to run out of room for it all!

Besides, consider the process required so that just one billion of us can have the entire set of Harry Potter books on a shelf at home. The millions of trees, the fossil fuels required to transport those trees and then convert them to paper to be printed upon and assembled into book form. Then more fossil fuel required to move the books from manufacturing to distribution, and from there to your local bookstore – where you burn even more fossil fuel to buy them or to have them delivered by fleets of fossil fuel burning brown trucks.

Simple logic dictates that this model cannot be sustained.

I bought the first Kindle and now have 153 electronic books in my library. I love the electronic format for it’s convenience and space saving features. Whenever I leave home, my entire library can accompany me wherever I go though I don’t use the actual Kindle anymore. Now I use the Kindle Reader app as I find it more convenient still to read the books on my phone than to carry another device.

But electronic books aren’t perfect.

The digital rights management "protection" stuff makes it difficult, if not impossible to share a book with a friend. Once I’ve read a book I can’t sell it in next years garage sale. And at the moment, not every single title published is available in this format.

What’s more, without the aroma and the texture of the pages, it’s all but impossible to fall in love with an electronic book.

I feel sorry for this and future generations who will never know the joy of plunging into long rows of small drawers holding index cards, one detailing each and every title – and shelf after shelf supporting literally thousands of actual books in a place we used to call the library.