When Amazon launched the Kindle Fire last year, it made the rather irritating decision not to bring it to the UK at the same time. The rotters didn’t even let us have the Kindle Touch, leaving us with the (admittedly excellent) fourth generation Kindle. If the rumours are to be believed, however, changes are afoot, and with the UK braced to receive Amazon’s latest baby, we’ve managed to get our hands on an import to see what’s what.

Probably the most important thing about the Fire isn’t the hardware, the software or content offering, but the price. With no official confirmation of the launch, we can’t say for sure how much it will be, but in the US it’s $199, and given Amazon’s track record on its E Ink Kindles, we can’t see it costing much more than £200. In fact, it could be less. That’s significant. Where most other manufacturers are using the iPad as a yardstick when it comes to pricing, with 10in tablets costing around £350 to £400, and smaller tablets at around £300 to £350, Amazon is setting out all on its own, with a price more akin to no-brand Chinese knockoffs. The big question is, would you buy one?

The first thing to get straight is that this isn’t a tablet in the traditional sense. Yes, it runs Android (version 2.3), but the user interface is heavily customised. There are none of the ugly smartphone-esque graphics normally associated with cheap tablets – it actually looks attractive – and it works in an entirely different way.

Gone is the usual widget- and icon-littered Android desktop, to be replaced with a bookshelf-themed front-end. Along the top of the screen runs a bar with links to different content categories: Newsstand, Books, Music, Video, Docs, Apps and Web. Below it is a horizontally scrolling carousel of recent items, and this covers not only books and other content, but also apps and web pages. At the very bottom on the screen – on the bottom shelves – is a list of customisable favourites, to which any number of items can be added.

It’s a design that makes sense, and the reason it works so well is that it’s driven by Amazon’s content offering. You’ll doubtless be familiar with the company’s ebook and periodical library, but the Fire also provides the opportunity to rent or buy movies and TV shows, and purchase music, with users also able to borrow books using the Kindle library lending service. And with the Fire, that content doesn’t even have to be downloaded and stored locally. As with books on the Kindle, Amazon keeps copies of all purchased content in the cloud, and files can be streamed or downloaded as needed. Files can even be removed and downloaded again later.

We weren’t able to test the whole process of downloading videos and music, unfortunately, as the service isn’t yet live in the UK, but we were able to stream track previews and movie trailers smoothly, and the Kindle eBooks service worked beautifully.

Performance

Clearly Amazon has put a lot of thought into the integration of content, but to hit such a low price it’s abundantly clear that cutbacks have been made. The first casualty is the design. The Fire is a real slab of a tablet, measuring 11.5mm thick and weighing 404g – that may seem fine, but this is a 7in tablet designed for reading books on, and held in one hand it feels unwieldy compared to the best small Android tablets.

There’s also very little in the way of design nicety. There isn’t much a manufacturer can do with the glass touchscreen of a tablet, admittedly, but the rear and edges give it a chance to shine. Amazon has turned down that opportunity. The rear of the Fire is plain black, slightly rubbery plastic, with the word “kindle” etched in counter-relief, while the edges are straight up and down – not a contour nor a chamfered edge in sight.

If the looks are disappointing, the specifications are doubly so. The dual-core Texas Instruments CPU looks fine on paper, but with only 512MB of RAM to back it up, the tablet frequently feels a little ragged and jittery. The user interface isn’t affected too badly, but scrolling up and down, zooming and panning around some web pages (the BBC or YouTube homepages, for instance) is hardly smooth. Here, Amazon’s lauded Silk browser, which loads some page elements server side and attempts to predict what you’ll click on next in a bid to speed up, cannot help. The slight performance lag also affects ebooks, pages of which seem to catch slightly as they’re swiped aside.

Other disappointments include a lack of Bluetooth, no front or rear camera, single-band wireless, no GPS, and limited storage space of 8GB, with no microSD for expansion. There’s no 3G version either, which seems odd, and the resolution of the screen – 1,024 x 600 – lends a slightly grainy look to affairs.

On the positive side, the benchmark figures indicate that the tablet should take most apps and games in its stride. It finished the SunSpider JavaScript test in a time of 2,567ms – not the quickest we’ve seen, but far from poor. It completed the PC Pro HTML render test in an average of 15.5 seconds, which again isn’t bad. Although we weren’t able to use the Amazon app store, we were able to side-load a couple of games and get them running using their APK install files, and both worked smoothly.

Other aspects of performance are more impressive. The screen is a bright IPS model – we measured it at a maximum 414cd/m2, with a contrast ratio of 796:1 – so movies do look punchy and colourful, notwithstanding the low resolution. With the brightness turned down, reading text is easy on the eye too, and with more options for tweaking text than the standard Kindle, the Fire makes a decent ebook reader.

Finally, in our looped video battery test we found the Fire lasted a total of 8hrs 43mins, which is pretty good compared to other Android touchscreen devices of a similar size and with similar specifications. It’s clearly nowhere near the E Ink-based Kindle that can last weeks on a single charge, though.

Prospects

That Kindle Fire, then, is tricky to assess in light of established genres. In the context of other Android-based tablets it looks light in several areas; things we’d normally come down heavily on a normal tablet for. Although the screen is bright, and battery life acceptable, other tablets offer far more power and features, better responsiveness and more attractive design. On the other hand, it won’t satisfy fans of the E Ink Kindles, with their huge battery life and paper-like displays.

Consider it on its own merits, however, and the Fire begins to make more sense. Its inextricable links with Amazon’s services, and its focus on content, in fact, make it more of an iPad-lite than a budget Android knockoff. The cloud-based approach is ingenious, too, and adds an extra dimension.

The key thing, as mentioned at the very beginning of this preview, is the price. If Amazon does bring this tablet to the UK, and it’s around the same cost as it is in the US, it will almost certainly have a winner on its hands. It’s clearly far from perfect, but the low price, coupled with the Kindle name and Amazon’s content services, should be enough to ensure it’s a force to be reckoned with in 2012.

Some of the books are honeypots from professional authors, hoping to lure you into their 23-part series that tells the life story of an amazing spy/explorer/dancer/footballer. There’s nothing wrong with this, just go into it with your eyes open.

Some are only briefly reduced to free as a promotion, before being shoved up to full price. You can keep an eye out for such promotions by entering your email address at www.ereaderiq.co.uk (this site also provides a slightly clumsy search mechanism for finding free books).

Then there are some that barely qualify for the terms “books” at all. O’Reilly, for instance, produces a number of very short publications about technology that feel more like extended articles.

So where do you go to find new books? First of all, naturally, you read this article. But after that you should head to www.amazon.co.uk and click on the Kindle Books link. To the right of the page you’ll see a Bestsellers box; click on the “Kindle Store : Books” link and you’ll see a straightforward listing on the right, plus a useful list of categories on the left. Click on the category you’re interested in – let’s say Science Fiction – and you’ll see the bestsellers, both paid for and free.

If using the Kindle itself then Amazon makes it a little trickier to find the free books, but it’s still possible to access the top 100. Select “Shop in Kindle Store”, then “Kindle Best Sellers” under Featured. You’ll find the link “Kindle Top 100 Free” on the top right hand of the screen.

Here’s our pick of the free books we’ve found – feel free to add your own suggestions in comments:

The Penal Colony

A gripping read from start to finish, this novel depicts an all-too-conceivable situation where Britain despatches its most dangerous prisoners to remote islands. Think of it as Lord of the Flies for adults. The Penal Colony is based on Sert, where The Village is the pinnacle of island culture: hot water, limited electricity and a direct link with the prison authorities make it the best place to live. But, as our arrogant protagonist Routledge discovers, you have to earn your place: when he arrives, insisting himself innocent of the murder of a young woman he met on a train, he’s told he can only be allowed in if he survives six days on the outside. But it doesn’t take him long to be captured by the biggest psychopath on the island…

Jane Eyre

The setting may be old fashioned and all too reminiscent of stuffy English Literature lessons, but the story is so strong – and your compassion with Jane Eyre so compelling – that you’ll likely rush through it if you haven’t done so before. As with A Christmas Carol (and for that matter all the Bronte sisters’ works), this book has been lovingly transcribed from the original and formatted for the Kindle by a community of literary do-gooders. If you haven’t read a classic for donkey’s years, let this one guide you back into the fold.

A Little Book of Christmas

Yes it’s twee and sentimental, but if A Christmas Carol wasn’t enough to get you into a festive mood then this book definitely will. It’s a collection of short stories tied together not only by the C word but also sheer niceness. Whether it’s the story of George W Hetherington, a Scrooge-like figure whose anti-Christmas sentiment is swept away when he becomes involved with a poverty-stricken family, or the way a New York Santa helps Little Billee find his way home, if you don’t have a tear in your eye at some point while reading this book your heart is made of flint.

A Little Bit of Everything for Dummies

There’s no getting away from the fact this is basically an advert for the For Dummies series, but it’s still packed with information. There’s a nostalgic chapter lifted from the first ever Dummies book – DOS for Dummies – plus another about networking in Windows 7, both written in a style you’ll either find chatty or enormously irritating. But it’s impressive by the sheer range of other topics covered: how to keep a relationship happy, enjoying an evening out in French, meditation tips, learning to play rock music on the guitar… and much more.

A Christmas Carol

Everyone knows the story of Scrooge, if only through the various movie tellings – prepare yourself to be shocked, but The Muppet’s Christmas Carol wasn’t the original. Like so many classic novels, it’s been converted to Kindle form by “the community”, and aside from the odd formatting error it has a very professional finish. Certainly you won’t be distracted from Dickens’ most accessible plot, with straightforward storytelling making this just as suitable a read for young children as it is for adults who may, just like Scrooge, have fallen under the magic spell of money.

What is HTML5?

We’re not massive fans of most of O’Reilly’s free books on the Kindle – as we mentioned above, they have a tendency to feel like extended web articles – but this one serves as an excellent introduction to HTML5. The opening pages focus on what it means for the end user, and it’s helped along by a friendly tone, but the target reader is always the aspiring web programmer and so there’s plenty of more meaty information to get your teeth into.

White Fang

There are plenty of children’s books available for free on the Kindle, and Jack London’s tale of survival is among the best. You follow the story of White Fang, half dog, half wolf, as he moves from one perilous situation to another. Most children will love the idea of being this close to the wild – he isn’t a gentle dog, to put it mildly, but most of the violence is hinted at rather than explicitly described – and unlike many such books it does its best to steer away too much from humanising wild animals. A deserved classic.

The Crew

Dougie Brimson was already considered an “expert” in football hooliganism before The Crew, his first novel, was published in the late 1990s, and he brings all that knowledge to bear in the plot. We follow two main characters: an under-pressure cop and a claustrophobic hooligan who’ll do anything to avoid being locked up in a cell. The police use this knowledge to persuade him to work with an undercover officer as they infiltrate an operation being run by the UK’s most notorious hooligan mastermind, with dramatic and unexpected consequences.

South: The Story of Shackleton’s 1914-1917 Expedition

If you’re hoping for a book with stylistic prose and beautiful descriptions of landscapes then look away now. Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton is a man who calls the killing of a seal a killing of a seal, and this journal features plenty of that. But while the prose is straightforward it’s also compelling, dragging you through the long months his ship spent locked in ice while they waited for summer to reappear. It’s a superb record, not only of that trip, but also a historical record to reflect the state of the world at the beginning of the First World War.

The brilliant book of calm

This is just one of the many self-help books that litter the Amazon freebie list, but it’s certainly one of the better ones. You’ll need to be in the mood for it – the one person we know who would benefit from The brilliant book of calm, PC Pro editor Barry Collins, probably wouldn’t make it through two pages before slamming it into the proverbial bin – but if you ignore the awkward humorous asides then it becomes a little more bearable. And actually, on occasion, thought-provoking. Please note this book is no longer free; since this article was written, its price has gone up to around £7.

Nobody’s that poor, not really, because if they were that poor Bob Geldof would immediately start singing at them, and if that’s not reason enough to be upwardly mobile then nothing is – I mean, look at Ethiopia. The entire country gave up famine just to get him to bugger off.

So I’m waiting in this village for my lift to arrive, reading my Kindle to pass the time, and all of a sudden I look up to discover about 20 kids stood in a big group, just watching me: big eyes, curious expressions, ridiculously cute and all intent on the Kindle.

Now to be fair, I’m 6ft 2in and look like something a particularly stupid child would make out of Plasticine. I’ve travelled right around the world and been an object of fevered fascination almost everywhere I’ve visited. Having a daft face tends to draw the crowds, but these kids were enraptured by the gizmo in my hands, despite the fact that they couldn’t possibly know what it was.

I think a charity could do a lot worse than to load a few up with dictionaries, school books and novels and send them to some remote schools in developing nations

So I sat down on the kerb and showed them. Their reaction is the point of technology. It’s what every device maker should aim for, and what every owner wants to inspire in others. Their wonder reminded me just how much I loved it, and why. Just turning the page caused them to drag their friends over, and there’s no reality where changing the font size of your book should make you cooler than a Jimmy Hendrix guitar solo.

That was just the warm-up act though, it was the text-to-speech feature that pretty much made me the best friend of the entire village. Old men, young men, a few old woman, it was a trick they made me repeat half-a-dozen times, drawing a few more out of their homes with every mangled vowel.

After about ten minutes, I let one of the kids play with it, but instead of trying to mess with the bells and whistles, he just started reading aloud. I was wrong before: this is the point of technology. Debating the implications of eBook readers on education is an entire blog in itself, but I think a charity could do a lot worse than to load a few up with dictionaries, school books and novels and send them to some remote schools in developing nations.

There’s probably reams of soul-crushing statistics on why it wouldn’t do any good in the long run, but I’m sick of charities telling me that by not giving them £10 a month I’m indirectly clubbing poor children to death with dolphins. Show me something positive for once and just maybe I’ll open my wallet and break my long-held embargo on sending perfectly good cash to people I don’t trust to scratch a moral itch I don’t have.

I considered leaving my Kindle for them, I really did. There’s a ton of self-justifying reasons why I didn’t, but the truth is that I’m just not that nice a person and I was really enjoying the book I was reading (Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey). Now that I’m back though, I think maybe I made a mistake. I like my Kindle, but for an hour on a miserably hot afternoon in Central India, an entire village fell in love with it. Sometimes technology is brilliant, and perhaps I should have let them discover that.

Amazon has very excitedly shared a couple of stunning stats with the world. First, sales of eBooks overtook new paperbacks for the first time, after doing the same for hardcover books last year. Second, it rang up a whopping $13 billion in sales.

I find this fascinating, as my own book buying has mirrored this very trend, with eBooks overtaking paper titles of any kind since I bought a Kindle in November.

I’ve surveyed my book purchases in the months before my Kindle acquisition, and compared it to the titles I’ve picked up since. To make the stats easier to follow, I’ve rendered the results in handy chart form (with sincere apologies to the much funnier 27BSlash6).

Before my Kindle, I mostly borrowed books from friends (and the library, before I forgot to bring one back for six months) and bought used copies from second-hand shops. The only time I picked up new copies was in the airport before a flight. Still, all were made of paper:

And after I picked up my Kindle, this is what my purchasing looks like:

I haven’t bought a single paper book (aside from gifts) since November. While it makes for a nice clean pie chart, I don’t think the trend will continue quite so perfectly; Tim Danton just handed me a beautiful book — the paper kind — of infographics, and the full colour, incredibly detailed pages wouldn’t work so well on a Kindle.

That covers amazing Amazon stat number one. What about the double-digit billions in sales? I’ve another chart for that:

In the year before I bought my Kindle, I bought a spent a whopping £5.48 on new books from Amazon. Since November, I’ve spent £92.87. It’s easy to see where the sales jump comes from — and to see why I’m so desperate for the eBook lending system to actually work…

1. Hit the Menu button and the Shop button is already pre-selected. Your account details are already installed on the device before the Kindle is shipped to you.

2. Here’s the store homepage. Pretty it isn’t; functional it is. Personalised recommendations appear at the bottom, and all you need do to carry out a search is start typing.

3. I’m looking for Charles Dickens’ complete works.

4. A few seconds later, here’s what you get: a list of 1,290 titles, with what I was after right at the top. Just select it using the D-pad to read more information.

5. Three simple options appear on the next page. Can you guess how to buy the book?

6. And that’s it. All you have to do now is wait a few moments for the book (or books in this case) to download and you can start reading. There’s even the option to cancel the order, in case you clicked Buy by accident, or you suddenly get cold feet.

And the best bit is, with the 3G version, you can do this just as easily and quickly on the train in to work or lying on the beach on holiday (Amazon has a roaming agreement in around 100 countries). Genius.

But there’s a hidden side to these eBook readers. They’re often used to consume dense, technical or academic material, usually in PDF format, and these documents are often awkward, containing diagrams, figures organised in tabular form and text organized in columns.

In the US the Amazon Kindle DX covers this sort of scenario perfectly, but over here you’re stuck with the smaller devices, so it’s critical that zoom features, text reflow and panning are easy to use. We’ve already noted in our full length review that the Sony Reader Touch PRS-650 does all this well, and better than the Amazon Kindle at that, but at the request of a handful of readers (human ones), here’s a more in-depth analysis and comparison.

Load a PDF document on each, click the zoom button and this is what you see. In the top image the  Kindle offers a range of zoom levels but no typeface enlargement. Below it, the Sony Reader Touch provides three methods of manipulating your document: typeface enlargement options run along the bottom (XS, S, M,L, XL and XXL), a Zoom In button offers standard page zoom and pan, and to the right, Page Mode offers various ways of slicing and navigating a PDF page.

This shows the result of the Kindle’s first step of zoom – there’s clearly not enough granularity in the adjustment because there’s no setting that allows you to fit the text to the width of the screen. The result? You have to pan right to finish each sentence. It’s inflexible, awkward, and rules out the Kindle for the consumption of complicated PDF files.

The Sony, on the other hand, gives you a number of choices to suit a number of different scenarios. Above, we’ve enlarged the typeface one step. You can see the text now stretches the full width of the screen, and although the original formatting is lost, there are no awkward line breaks or spacing problems. It’s much more readable.

If you want to retain the formatting, simply tap the Zoom In button. A slider on the left-hand side of the screen lets you finely tune the zoom level. The Lock button at the top re-enables turn control while retaining the same zoom level, while other shortcuts offer simple fit-to-width and fit-to-height operations. If the text is still unreadable with the text stretched to the edge of the screen, the touchscreen provides a quick and simple way to pan around at closer zoom levels. Just hold your finger to the screen and drag.

That’s not all, however. The Sony also offers a number of shortcuts to make the reading and navigation of complex texts simpler. The page mode button offers five quick options, the most useful of which splits the page into four or six sub-pages to make reading column-based pages easier.

Choose the 2-Column Split and, as you swipe your finger across the screen left to right, instead of moving you to the next page the view moves from the top left position down in stages until the bottom of the page is reached, then up to the top right and down again until the bottom of the page is reached once more.

So there you have it. The Sony is a clear winner in this comparison, proving that the Kindle, though brilliant in most ways, certainly isn’t flawless.

This was the first comment I heard this morning when I returned to the office after visiting the British Library to play with Sony’s new Reader Touch. As an eBook advocate, I’ve been hearing this refrain ever since the original Sony PRS 505 dropped on my desk last year. People who like to read adore paperbacks. They’re cheap, perfect at what they do and are pleasingly tactile. We like how they feel, the way they smell; we like to run our hands over them in a book shop.

eBook readers have failed to convince because books don’t need upgrading. It’s brilliant that an eBook reader can hold 350 books, but the majority of people don’t carry around 350 books. The majority of people won’t read 350 books in their lifetime. If eBook readers are going to break out of their niche and really scar the public psyche they need to start offering useful features their paper brethren don’t. And with the curtain raised, let me usher the Sony Reader Touch to centre stage.

The Reader Touch features a 6in 800 x 600 touchscreen which allows you to add research notes and highlight chunks of text either with a finger or the supplied stylus. Stuck on a troubling word? Double tap it and a definition will appear at the bottom of the screen courtesy of the inbuilt Oxford English dictionary. Double tap the definition and you’ll be taken to that page in the dictionary allowing you to look up synonyms, usage or etymology. Of course, this is just a feature list, but what makes the Reader Touch special is how well it all works.

As you makes notes and highlight text, they’re indexed on a separate notes screen, with a single tap taking you back to the original page – removing the need to flip through the entire book. Pages spring into view, rather than doddering onto the screen – which has been the most common complaint associated with eBook readers. And that screen, gracious. As with the Kindle 2 it renders in 16 shades of grey, which gives text a pleasing crispness without it ever feeling like your eyes are doing laps on a sandpaper treadmill.

However, the thing that really impressed me was the build quality. If you want an eBook reader, your wallet is going to be at least £180 lighter (£250 for the Reader Touch) when you’re done. Needless to say, if I’m going to hand over that amount of cash, the device in my hand should be so lovely, so well built, so utterly desirable that I could get married and be three years into the relationship before my wife bothered to look at my face. Unfortunately, most eBook readers feel cheaper than Jordan’s relationship advice.

If I had the Reader Touch in my hand, my wife wouldn’t bother looking at my face until my funeral. There’s no creaking, no cheap plastic, or tacky rubber. The aluminium case is beautifully designed and reassuringly solid. The other thing that could be worth looking out for is Sony’s plan to tie up with libraries to offer eBook rentals. Details are sketchy beyond the basic plan, which will see books licensed to the reader for between 14 and 29 days. After that, they’ll automatically expire, meaning they don’t have to be taken back. The scheme’s already being trialled in the US, with a UK version expected “sometime within the next year”.

All in all then, my hopes are high for this, and I should be able to deliver a definitive review in the next few weeks.

The first thing to note is that the UK eBook market isn’t actually as packed as it first appears. In fact it can be boiled down to the Sony PRS 505, the iRex range and the rest. And when I say “rest” I’m talking about the BeBook, Cool-er, Cybook Gen 3 and the Elonex eBook now on sale through Borders. Don’t be fooled by the slight modifications to their cases; beneath the exterior they’re all essentially the same device.

Basically, manufacturers buy the reference design from US-firm Netronix, tweak the hardware and software, slap their name on the case and sell them on. Currently at the top of this pile of identi-books is the Cool-er which is based on Netronix’s latest spec and so boasts double the RAM of its compatriots, a nicer screen and a faster processor making it noticeably nippier than the rest. If the Cool-er’s lurid colours and dedication to sexing up reading aren’t to your taste, then I suggest you take a gander at the elegant Sony PRS 505 – which sits at the top of our A List.

My objection to the current crop of eBook readers has always been the price. Getting yourself into the eBook game is probably going to cost £190 or more, before you factor in the ridiculous cost of the eBooks themselves. Spending that sort of money requires reward. The device in your hand should feel special, it should make you smile every time you reach for it. This is a roundabout way of saying it shouldn’t feel like something they just showed you how to make on Blue Peter. Alas, the current crop of eBook readers don’t appear to have learned this lesson and too often feel cobbled together.

The Sony PRS 505 is fantastic because it feels like £190 worth of kit. It’s beautifully designed, feels solid in the hand and looks like something that belongs in your study. If this is important to you, then you really only have one option at the moment.

Business users may be better off considering something by iRex. These readers feature 8in touchscreens – as opposed to the 6in found on other models – which allow annotation and there’s wireless. They’re also going to cost you over £400, which is something to bear in mind.

The other thing to be wary of are the formats. The eBook market’s littered with dozens of the buggers and no eBook reader supports them all. The BeBook has the broadest support, at the cost of build quality and design. The Cool-er and Sony PRS 505 support the fewest. As it stands, the majority of eBooks sold through online stores, including WH Smiths, Borders and Waterstones, arrive in the ePub format which needs to be unlocked using Adobe’s free Digital Editions software. Once done that eBook can then be read on five different devices, though these can be changed at will. It’s easily done and well explained by the software, so don’t worry about that, just make sure that whatever reader you go for supports the formats you’re likely to be using.

The other issue, of course, is price. It may surprise you to know that eBooks are typically the same price, if not more expensive, than their paperback equivalents. The reasons for this are complex, incredibly stupid, and ultimately irrelevant. Just be prepared to pay quite a lot for you eBooks. There are lots of sites offering out-of-copyright books for free – which just about covers all the classics – though ropey formatting is sometimes an issue. I suggest Project Gutenberg as a start.

Of course, you don’t do yourself any harm by hanging fire for the next generation of readers. Touchscreens, colour displays, and faster rendering are going to be the pillars of the next crop of readers and could make them far more appealing to the fence sitters. And we’re still waiting for the Kindle to rock up here. Still, I hope some of this helps, and if you have any more questions give me a shout in the comments.

We’ve also got a comprehensive feature covering all the basics, reviewing all the readers, and giving you the lowdown and the issues holding up the adoption of eBooks.

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.” 

No, they’re not. Go to the Amazon Kindle 2 Page, click on the top video and listen for yourself. It sounds like a Dalek that’s been sent on media training. And note that Amazon only lets the speech synthesiser ramble for a sentence or so – probably just before it horribly mispronounced Mr Darcey as “Mister Darkie” and  sparked an international race-relations incident. 

There’s a reason publishers pay actors such as Stephen Fry, Martin Jarvis and Rob Brydon a healthy wedge to narrate their books – and that’s because no-one wants to listen to Davros reading War and Peace. With the best will in the world, even Stephen Hawking got a narrator in for the audio book of A Brief History Time.

Nevertheless, Amazon has buckled and is now letting publishers decide which novels they wish to be read aloud by the Kindle. 

Read my lips, Mr Blount. G-E-T-A-L-I-F-E. 

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.

But even then, when all these problems are eventually solved – and they will be, because even a blind squirrel finds an acorn eventually – it still won’t make a damn bit of difference to my feelings. Yes, you can rabbit on about convenience, and having every single book on the planet in the palm of your hand. But a book is about more than just the words on the page. A book is the entire experience, from walking into the bookstore itself, to reading it and passing it onto a friend.

For proof, just look at the enraptured expressions of shoppers next time you walk into Waterstones or the Oxfam book shop. Shopping for books is a pleasure, people dawdle over them, they roll them around in their hands. They read the blurb on the back, flick through the pages, linger on random sentences. They smile. A book is an event, but eBooks dilute this event to mere words. They strip out the feeling, the sensation, the experience that surrounds a novel. They make it – soulless – machine like.

I think eBooks probably have their place. Manuals, technical books, maybe even schoolbooks would undoubtedly benefit from a technological overhaul. As I remember, the sheer weight of textbooks that accompanied me during my A Levels made every day purgatory and I’m sure more than a few teenagers would be delighted to have that weight replaced by a reader jangling in their pocket.

But not me. I love books. I love technology. But in this case, I’m convinced the two are better off apart.