Let’s take it for granted that you are an avid, engaged reader of the best contemporary international writing in English and in translation. You are, as fast-food chains charmingly denote their loyal customers, a ‘heavy-user’. Your homes will be librarynths, your leisure dominated by the twinned pleasures of silence and the written word (on which subject I urge you to read Tim Parks’ Teach us to Sit Still – just published to deservedly superb reviews). That The Book has endured unchanged for centuries is now remarked on with tedious regularity. But we live in interesting times. Two recent trips to America, the first last October and again this month, prompted me to wonder how many of you, a rough cross-section of readers of literary fiction, read your books as e-books?
As I visited editors, agents, scouts and authors in New York a week ago, I found a very different picture. Back in October, US publishers were emerging from a period of redundancies, organisational changes, national recession and consumer and book-trade nervousness. Everyone was waiting with bated breath to see if Christmas would come. What certainly did happen that Christmas was that a lot of e-readers were sold, hundreds of thousands or over a million, depending on whose word you take. And this mass upsurge in the ownership of hardware has changed the landscape at a stroke.
So, where certain types of writing had been doing well as e-books – thrillers, crime, business – there is now a facility amongst readers of all types to choose between electronic and physical editions. Take The Imperfectionists, an inventive, waspishly clever debut novel about the decline of the newspaper industry: back to back ecstatic reviews exhausted bookshops’ limited stocks overnight. Did customers, as they might here, wait for a reprint, or order from Amazon, or just forget about it? No, enough could now opt to read it as an e-book and to own it seconds after reading the reviews. Whilst e-books still form a smallish part of overall sales, the anecdotal picture has e-sales now regularly making up twenty, thirty or forty per cent of the sales for literary fiction. Some household names are selling one for one. And there are examples where e-sales outweigh physical sales. The bookselling giant Barnes & Noble is planning a huge campaign for their own e-reader, the Nook, this Christmas, just as Amazon threw the kitchen sink at the Kindle last year.
The common thread to what New York publishers told me was that when it happens, it happens fast. So it goes with tipping points. What I hadn’t expected, though, was a renewed sense of optimism, even in a time of unprecedented change. Making predictions is a famously risky business, especially about the future, but US publishing appears to have glimpsed one where the e-book is not the harbinger of doom that some would have you believe, but a tool which allows readers flexibility, and which can happily co-exist with the dog-eared, annotated, beloved volumes that line the walls of our homes.
Over to you. Are e-books a foreign country to you or does this very discussion seem luddite? Do you miss a cover’s visual route into a book? Do you want your e-books enhanced with interactivity and graphics? Tell all.

Stuart Williams, Harvill Secker Editorial Director