Luddites of the world unite - you have a new leader. Step forward Roy Blount Jnr, a man who has one too many Os in his surname, in my opinion.

Blount is the president of the US Authors Guild, and last week wrote an opinion column for the New York Times entitled The Kindle Swindle? Blount argued that the new Read-To-Me feature of Amazon’s latest eBook reader was akin to the end of mankind as we know it; a computerised text-synthesiser that was going to leave the audio book industry as burnt out as a carelessly parked Porsche on a South London council estate. 

“You may be thinking that no automated read-aloud function can compete with the dulcet resonance of Jim Dale reading Harry Potter or of authors, ahem, reading themselves,” Blount argued.  ”But the voices of Kindle 2 are quite listenable.” 

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Don’t get me wrong, I quite like technology. I’m the kind of person who’d be admiring the massive metal foot of the Terminator even as it stomped my skull into the dirt. But when it comes to eBooks, not only am I not sold, I’m sat on the shelf hiding my price tag behind my back and shooing people on towards the muffins opposite.

And it’s not just that the entire eBook market is beset with ridiculous proprietary formats, clunky readers and expensive texts being pushed by companies whose only knowledge of books is a hazy memory of drawing moustaches on sperms in science class. Even Amazon, which built an empire on the blighters, seems to have forgotten why we love them - digital texts cost more than paperbacks, you can’t share them and its reader looks as if it were built in 1893 and runs on steam. Amazon, quite contrary to its claims, doesn’t have an eBook strategy so much as a series of really bad ideas all lined up in a row.

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