A remarkable, seemingly unbeatable technology has been causing much excitement. A device designed for reading words on the go, it is portable and lightweight, with unlimited operating time and no battery worries. It is wireless and cheap. Yes, it is a book.

Given the advantages of the humble book, it seems inconceivable that it could ever be replaced by an electronic reader. But, just as the music, film and television industries have been forced to grapple with the consequences of the internet, publishers are facing up to the digital threat. In the latest in a series of industry moves to embrace the digital world, Random House announced yesterday that it would allow readers to download chapters of books. HarperCollins, which is owned by News Corporation, parent company of The Times, has revealed plans to allow readers access to previews of new titles online. British and American publishers are rushing to digitalise their back catalogues.

They are entirely right to do so. The slow death of the book may be with us. That was an incredibly painful sentence to write. Most bibliophiles balk at the merest hint that digital e-books could replace “real-books”. But vinyl-lovers sneered at CDs. Those who lovingly categorised their CD collections were seduced, in turn, by the iPod. The ancient poets who sung of the wrath of Achilles from memory, like generations before them, were doubtless indignant when some bright spark suggested writing the Iliad down for the first time.

Much has been written about the tactile relationship that a reader has with a book and how that will fend off the internet challenge. But the real saviour of books has been their simplicity and their portability, as well as the lack of a real alternative.

Readers will be as fickle as listeners when the alternatives are genuinely enticing. How many hard-core bibliophiles sneak online to buy at Amazon, despite pious words about the sanctity of bookshops? A new generation of e-books is emerging that will challenge the real-book. Amazon launched its Kindle e-book device in November and sales have been strong. It may be expensive at $399 and there are as yet no plans to roll it out beyond the United States, but bibliophiles should be very afraid.

They may want to gather every Kindle at loose in the world and build an e-book pyre, but this will not stop the technology advancing. Would an e-book burning elicit the same horror as a real-book burning? Is it the paper or the words written on it that count?

It may be difficult, and painful, to predict that the e-book will vanquish the real-book, but publishers have to work on the assumption that it could happen. It makes sense that Random House's first downloadable by chapters book is a business title: Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. This is not about keeping an audience hanging - crowds will not be thronging the internet cafés to find out the fate of idea No6, as they once descended on the docks of New York to find out what happened to Little Nell. Small chapters are easily digestible on a BlackBerry, the tool of choice for this book's market.

Business and reference books are already making the transition to e-books. The ability to search chunks of text and carry huge reference books in your palm is invaluable to some professions. Already, law libraries stand empty as lawyers search cases on their computers.

The transition for the fiction reader will be slower, but it is a real possibility that the real-book will suffer the same fate as Little Nell. If you want to know what happened to her, she's freely downloadable from a number of sources. Just Google her.

antonia.senior@thetimes.co.uk

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