One day, you'll be telling your grandchildren about the days you used to read words printed on 'paper', in big, thick, heavy slabs known as 'books'. Shrugging, they'll put their virtual reality glasses on and keep reading.
For now, most of us still read the old fashioned way. But for how much longer?
The news this week surfaced that e-book sales are skyrocketing in the UK; up from just £4million last year to £16million. Add in academic books and the total reached £196million.
It is, of course, still a drop in the ocean compared to the £3.1Billion overall book sales - but the sector is growing. Fast.
The reason is obvious - e-books actually work now.
Most technology sells itself on offering something that you can't normally do without it. iPods offer all your music in one place. Smartphones pride themselves on organising your life, one app at a time. But e-book readers are different. Though they do offer something that books cant do (the ability to carry your whole library around on the go), in order to become mass market they actually need to do what books do, not try to better them.
In years past, we were forced to read digital versions of the latest novels on dim, clunky screens with very poor battery life. Vision problems and a time limit are not something we normally associate with a good read.
Then, Amazon cracked it. Their Kindle e-reader actually mimics the appearance of paper. No million-colour screen, no ultra-sharp LCD, no HD flash-bang gimmickry. Just a screen which looks, feels and behaves like paper. A un-technological approach to the technology, or a technological approach to the untechnological? Whatever, it works.
The battery life is eye-watering, too - a month with the wi-fi switched off. That means, just like a book, that you can shove it in your bag on every hotel stay/holiday or commute and not have to worry about whether you can finish your gripping thriller before the battery decides it doesn't care if you're three pages away from finding out who the killer was, it would quite like a nap.
The beauty is that they behave like books, but with advantages on top. Thousands of books in one place. Free versions of public-domain classics like Shakespeare, Dickens and Stevenson. Instant downloading on any internet connection and, of course, no pulling out the bookmark by accident and having to work out where you were by the number of fingerprints on the pages.
Now, other e-readers have copied the technology and people are starting to flock to digital books at long last.
This is a critical juncture for digital books. There are still stumbling blocks that must be manouvered. Why, for example, are some digital books more expensive than their paperback counterparts? Surely, with no distribution or printing costs, no stock management and no re-sale value (thus, no second-hand market), e-books should be much, much cheaper than normal books. Even the same price would be a rip-off, but digital versions are often more expensive. Until this is sorted, e-books will never be anything more than a niche market.
The number of titles, too, needs to be improved. People won't buy a Kindle if they can't read all the latest chart books on the same day as the normal versions are released. The choice is rising all the time, but the number of traditional books still outweighs digital offerings by thousands upon thousands to one.
Staunch traditionalists (read: old people) also argue that the feeling of reading a proper book just can't be beaten with any slab of wires and circuitry. Until a Kindle can mimic that 'new paper' smell, they still can't do everything.
Whether these issues can be fixed - or accepted - remains to be seen. The truth is, though, that we are still years away from waving goodbye to traditional ink 'n' paper. But the first chapter in the story of the book's demise might already be written.
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