How important is a book? You know, the actual artefact. I am old enough to remember when paperback books were still regarded as sacrilegious. Somehow they seemed cheap and nasty.

Christmas stockings, well pillowslips in our house, bulged with properly bound hardback books. To buy a paperback as a present was to somehow devalue the recipient. Now, in our family, we're viewed as quite mad if we waste our money on a hardback. Unless, of course, we simply can't wait for the paperback edition.

So what of the future? Will we abandon atoms for bits? eBooks proliferate, but few are (yet?) regarded as the equal of a real book. They do, though, have the advantage of being sized to fit the content. Which is nice. So many books, especially non-fiction, are padded out to match the publishers' ideas of a perfect page count. Thus, in some cases, rendering them quite unreadable. IMHO. Shelf space for electronic books is infinite and delivery is more or less instant. So online definitely has its advantages.

Last week I met Bob Stein at the inaugural meeting of the Creative Coffee Club (more on that another time). He was introduced as being from the Institute of the Future of the Book. Had I known that he was a founder of the Voyager Company (a pioneering laserdisc and CD-ROM publisher) and had worked with the legendary Alan Kay (inventor of the Dynabook among many other achievements), I would have enthused a lot more about meeting him.

Still, his organisation intrigued me. He said something to me like, "a book is a means of communicating ideas across time and distance." Printed books have been a rather handy mechanism for doing this for the past few hundred years. But this doesn't mean they will continue. I confess to finding the idea of being bookless a bit weird. But I do like the fact that you only need ambient light in order to read one. But life moves on. And if you're interested in knowing where we might end up, especially since this has a direct bearing on your career, you might like to visit the Institute's blog  or join its newly-formed UK Facebook group.