Lucy Mangan

Whoops, it seems I’ve outsourced my entire life

In these anxious times, I search out good news like a pig snuffling for truffles. So I fell on this week’s figures about book sales as if they were the blackest, fungiest treasures of the Périgord. According to the Publishers Association, e-book sales are down – by 17 per cent last year. Meanwhile, those of physical books climbed by eight per cent, reaching their highest level since 2012.

Aware that I am someone for whom the word “change” is synonymous with “make worse in every conceivable way”, I did try to like the Kindle.

After all, it was miraculous that a device the size of a housemaid’s patch pocket could hold an entire library in its six-inch wide embrace. The backlit glow that enabled one to carry on reading long after the guttering bedtime candle had been spent? A veritable marvel of the age. And when flying to foreign climes, one no longer had to make painful packing choices regarding beach reads.

But, oh – it was a cold, unlovely business. Nothing to connect you physically to the book you were reading, or orientate you within it – no grain, no turning, no right and left-hand pages. Just a percentage at the bottom of the screen, telling you how far you’d come. As if reading were a race.

Some of us kept a quiet faith that – despite what we were being told – this wouldn’t be the future. And it seems that we were right. ‘‘Real’’ books are reasserting themselves, no longer left on the shelf. It feels like a win for minority optimists, at a time when we could – let’s face it – really do with one.

E-book sales fell 17 per cent; sales of physical books rose by 8 per cent