On my bookshelves sits a rare first edition. At ten years old it is already an antique, but it is in excellent condition for it has hardly been read. It is a lump of moulded plastic, one of the first attempts to replicate the reading experience on a handheld screen. Back in 1998, on this page, I predicted that this little machine would become “the most revolutionary concept in publishing since the invention of the mass-market paperback in 1936”. The e-book, I prophesied, would change the way we read for ever.

Having written those words, I put my e-book away, and never turned it on again.

The death of the traditional book has been predicted, wrongly, from the very start of the digital revolution. This week, as British publishers announced the further digitisation of their lists, the demise of the book was announced yet again. The electronic book would replace the paper variety, many of us believed, as surely as the grey squirrel has driven out the red. Yet this has not happened: the printed book is the same object, in essence, that it always was. Music, film and television have all transferred rapidly to digital format; reading in short form - blogs, journalism, e-mail - has thrived on the web since its inception.

But long-form literature has proved stubbornly resistant. Alongside those of us writing premature obituaries for the paper book were the traditionalists, insisting that the act of reading is so sacred that no machine could replicate it. In 1994, the novelist Annie Proulx declared: “Nobody is going to sit down and read a novel on a twitchy little screen. Ever.”

In fact, both sides of that debate were wrong. The electronic book will soon be a fact of culture. It took roughly five and a half centuries to perfect the paper book; the perfect electronic book should arrive in about a year. But it will never kill off the traditional book. Indeed, the two sorts of book may turn not to be rivals, but symbiotic species, sharing the same territory in amicable co-existence.

The problem with early e-books was technological and aesthetic. I never read my lump of flickering plastic again because it made my eyes water; the battery tended to run out on the edge of a cliff-hanger moment; many books were then unavailable in digital format, and the object itself was remarkably unlovely.

Book lovers argue that the tactile experience of reading can never be reproduced by a bleeping gadget - the gentle musty smell, the heft in the hand, the possibility of dropping it in the bath.

They are right, but those physical factors are secondary. Books work because, at their best, we forget they are there. The physical book magically disappears, leaving the reader to enter another world. The e-book, by contrast, with its buttons and hard plastic, tended to intrude on the consciousness, standing between the reader and the words. It was hard to get lost in an electronic book, because one kept tripping over signposts.

The new e-readers have addressed many of those problems. Some come bound in leather, and all are designed to look not like gizmos, but like books. The print, thanks to the invention of E Ink, which uses chemical beneath the screen to define each letter, is now as clear as any printed book. Increasingly, books can be downloaded from anywhere and carried around in their hundreds, in a pocket. Permanently linked to the internet, the book becomes a way of discovering new books. Electronic books may even fuel a new boom in literacy, for in the new electronic bookshop nothing need go out of print, and buying a new book is cheap, easy and instantaneous.

But as soon as one problem is solved, e-books have another on their hands. Whatever the potential of digital books, the issue of copyright remains crucial and unresolved. Unless copyright in the written word is defended with equal vigour on paper and in digital form, then the very technology that may revitalise publishing could also inflict huge damage. The costly and unnecessary Hollywood writers' strike, now ended after more than three months, is a stark warning of what can happen when potential profits from technological change are not fully understood nor fairly distributed.

Sorting out the copyright issue is vital, because, even farther into the future, the acts of writing and reading may become complementary, even mutually reinforcing. Just as readers of newspapers react and comment on live news and opinion, so books may become less the product of one individual writing in lonely isolation, and more of a collaborative effort. Naturally, this is more applicable to non-fiction writing: Zadie Smith is unlikely to react well to having readers peering over her shoulder. Already several books have been published as a result of reader feedback from ideas that began as blogs.

None of this, however, spells doom to the physical book. A reader who falls in love with a book, even if first read in electronic form, will still want to own it. Books do more than furnish a room: they are our intellectual companions.

Some books are worth sacrificing a tree to make; others are not, and that is the distinction that the electronic book offers. Ruskin once observed that literature is “divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time”. The books of all time will remain on paper, but those of the hour will increasingly be digital: the airport novel, the reference book, the celebrity memoir. A personal library will no longer be the repository of unread paperbacks, but a genuine index to individuality, as it was in the days when books were rare and precious.

Annie Proulx was wrong: people will read novels, including hers, on a screen, but whether they then decide to own the book, and keep it as a reflection of who they are, will depend on how much they love her writing.

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