Books to me have always been about smell and touch and reading in bed. They remind me of rainy Saturday afternoons thumbing through dog-eared paperbacks in second-hand bookshops or lazy breakfasts in cafes. Side by side lining shelves, they speak volumes about personality; walk into a stranger's home, browse his or her collection, and you learn a good deal about that person. More is the pity, then, that the digital age is driving them to extinction.
I hasten to inform that I say this not with dewy eyes, but a nostalgic gaze. Progress is inevitable and necessary. Books in digital form and readers like Kindle expand horizons and knowledge. There is no more convenient way of keeping informed and up to date.
That said, the experience is just not the same. You cannot read a Kindle in the bath. You have to switch it off as your plane is taking off and landing. Pressing a button to turn a page is just not the same as feeling the grain of paper as your fingers flick to the next chapter of your crime thriller.
I was therefore initially perturbed on Monday when I heard California's governor Arnold Schwarzenegger speak of his desire to drive nails into the coffin of the form of the book that I have so loved. He announced that the US state's students would soon be learning only from digital texts. Hard-bound books were heavy and expensive, he said. More to the point, they were antiquated in an age where 'our kids get their information from the internet, downloaded onto their iPods and in Twitter feeds to their cellphones'.
Mr Schwarzenegger the bodybuilder never got my attention and did nothing for me in his guise as an actor in movies like The Terminator and Conan the Barbarian. Films full of explosions, muscle-bound men jumping off roofs or falling down lift shafts just don't make me goggle-eyed. His becoming governor did not impress me. But politics can change people and it certainly has in this case.
At first Mr Schwarzenegger took Hollywood to the governor's mansion in Sacramento. Before long, he had a fleet of eight Hummers. But the green movement is strong in California and the actor had to think again. The fuel-guzzling Hummers were soon gone. He has ordered strict emissions standards for vehicles sold in the state and that government buildings use clean energy. A pledge has been made for levels of greenhouse gases to be cut by a quarter by 2020.
