My sister recently bought an e-reader to replace the bin bags full of books in the attic, and to collect her beloved fantasy novels into one accessible device.

The reason for this purchase, she told me, was that she couldn’t resist the tagline on the website that appealed to her impatience: ‘Start reading In the Hall of the Dragon King on your e-reader in under a minute’.

A few days later, I caught my sister reading a brand-new hardback in the living room with the dejected e-reader resting on the sideboard. “Some of the older books haven’t been digitalised yet,” she said, “and anyway, the device is more of a convenience. You know, for holidays…”

I think part of the reason – though she wouldn’t admit it now, being £152 poorer – was that she missed doing an activity that doesn’t require hi-tech apps or the charging of a battery.

What my sister said was right though. These e-readers – some of them thinner than a pencil – are convenient and represent a revolutionary advance in technology. They can store up to 3,500 of the 850,000 eBooks available, which is easier and quicker than going to the library or a bookshop.

So, rather than suggest e-readers are set to make the physical book obsolete, it’s fair to say that they’ll work well together, and might even come to depend on one another.

Ah, the e-reader-fans will say, but we’ll only need both until the long list of improvements to e-readers have been made. With each new e-reader model, physical books will be pushed further and further out of use.

These issues include copyright law concerns, potential damaged files and viruses, lack of options for the sight-impaired, the limited time period in which novels can be shared among friends… the list goes on. For the time it takes manufacturers to create the perfect e-reader, books are safe.

Or are they?

Do e-readers actually enhance the reading experience, in a way that books just can’t? Does the written content on the high-contrast e-ink screen engage the user any more than normal ink on paper? Above all, when the infallible e-reader is created, will books become useless in comparison?

I wager a categorical No.

The reader experience is about being sucked into the writing. While the Amazon Kindle wants the user to forget they’re using a Kindle, the reader will remember that this isn’t a book every time they have to turn the electronic page.

At the moment, e-reader manufacturers are digitalising books that writers wrote to be printed, on paper, with ink. The decisions regarding format, layout and structure that were meticulously pondered over by authors and their publishers – who had no intention for their work to be thrust into depths of technology – are now being put into the reader’s control.

Those who have e-readers can change the font size on the eBooks they’re reading, which, in turn, alters the formatting, and the message of the content is thus lost.

This shift in control from writer to reader pertains to poetry, where font size, style, colour, sentence length, stanza breaks, indentations and spacing affect the emotion evoked as well as the purpose and significance of the poem.

The difference between writing for a digital platform and writing for print has sparked debate over whether there could be a new literary genre. Is a digital novel the same as a printed novel?  And in the publishing industry, does the content of a printed magazine send the same message as when it’s online?

If publishers are going to alter the content of printed books so that it fits on to a digital platform, such as an e-reader or a website, then both forms of the content will need to be used together.

Twitterature by Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin is a collection of Twitter updates, where famous works of literature are narrowed down to 140 character statements. It’s funny and a great idea – but you wouldn’t read the following in place of the actual play:

Hamlet by William Shakespeare
@OedipusGothplex

My royal father’s gone and nobody seems to care.

Mom says to stop wearing black.

STOP TRYING TO CONTROL ME. I won’t conform! I wish my skin would just… melt.

AN APPARITION! This s*@! 3 just got HEAVY. Apparently people don’t accidentally fall on bottles of poison.

Gonna try to talk some sense into Mom because boyfriend totally killed Dad. I sense this is the moment of truth, the moment of candour and –

WTF IS POLONIUS DOING BEHIND THE CURTAIN?!

The change in how people are reading – and the fact that they’re reading more – is fantastic. Amazon is currently offering free eBooks of the Penguin Classics to encourage younger people to read older titles, and what could be wrong with that?

It’s essential that we don’t forget the importance of the book and what it can do for us. We should encourage advancement, but we shouldn’t reject the tools we’ve used to get here.

I don’t think we have to worry though. Although vinyls were replaced with CDs and VHS with DVDs, the perennial history of the book secures its place for the future.