AFTER queuing impatiently and unsuccessfully yesterday, I finally managed to secure a new iPhone 4 today, and it’s as beautiful and as magnificent a piece of technology as the hype promised. In fact I just finished a long FaceTime (videoconferencing) call with an old friend who happens to be the only other person I know with an iPhone 4 and wi-fi.

(I’ll cut to the chase: no, I don’t intend claiming reimbursement from Ipsa/Payroll for the cost, so please keep the sarcastic/”hilarious” comments to yourself…)

One of the things I wanted to check out was the iBook store. You get a free copy of A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh (read it) as a sample of how books look on the screen. And they do look rather lovely, with perfect detail and easily readable typeface, as well as the original illustrations. But after browsing the online store I considered buying another true literary classic: Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, which I read as a teenager but always intended to re-read and never did.

I downloaded the sample chapters you can look at for free before committing and was intrigued to see that Russell T. Davies had provided the foreword to the latest edition. Recalling fond memories of the importance of the book in his school, Davies wrote:

You’d see that novel, with its cover like neon left out in the rain, jutting out of back pockets and school bags, clutched like a shield, passed from hand to hand like an initiation. Okay, maybe Harry Potter had a  similar moment of glory. But you could never fit that into your back pocket. (This new edition still fits, I just checked.) Because that’s what I loved about this version of Hitchhiker’s, above any other; the soft, bendy, riffable paperbackness of it…

Maybe eBooks are going to take over, one day, but not until those whizzkids in Silicon Valley invent a way to bend the corners, fold the spine, yellow the pages, add a coffee ring or two and allow the plastic tablet to fall open at a favourite page.

Ironc, isn’t it, that such a foreword should appear in an e-version of the book?

So that made my mind up. There may well be the occasional book I will want to read in digital form – earlier this year I read a free downloaded copy of Wells’s War of the Worlds – but there are some books which are just too important, or at least are too important to one’s own past, to commit to anything less than proper, actual paper.

And The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy certainly falls into that category.