I got my hands on a Kindle e-book the other day, the kind you read on a screen. It had 200 titles on it, ranging from Jane Eyre to American Psycho. I wanted one immediately, with the urgency of a ten-year-old whose best mate has just acquired an Xbox. It was light, it was easy to use, it was, surely, the future of books. Using it, I could download the latest available titles from Amazon - there were 275,000 last time I checked, but that's probably doubled by now - do word searches, even install a text-to-speech option so it could read to me aloud in bed.
If I can handle all that (not necessarily guaranteed), then a Californian schoolkid can do it in his sleep. In fact, he probably finds the whole idea of a dog-eared old textbook, with inky smudges on the cover and a bit of doggerel verse scratched inside by its previous owner, positively gross.
So when Arnold Schwarzenegger, California's Governor, announced this week that his state is about to phase out school books and substitute the internet in classrooms from the autumn, the news was presumably greeted with little more than a twitch of a baseball cap (turned backwards). Because California is close to bankruptcy, saving money is a priority, and this move will cut several hundred million dollars from the education budget. Mr Schwarzenegger also thinks that converting schools to online study will help to keep pupils more up to date, and that once textbooks are digitised they can be so easily revised that learning will always keep pace with progress.
In California, progress matters. It may help to explain why it is home to more Nobel laureates than any other state in the world - about 90 in all, with the University of California providing nearly half of them. It may help to explain why California virtually invented the semiconductor, the modern computer industry and the dot-com revolution. It may even explain why the prospect of bankruptcy is less daunting in California than most other places in the world, because, though it may plunge faster into recession, it will doubtless find the means of climbing out of it well before anyone else.
What, then, will its pupils lose, as the last textbook slides down the last garbage chute and the rustle of turning pages is replaced by the rattle of a thousand keyboards? Those of us of a certain age who grew up with books such as Kennedy's Shorter Latin Primer, converted by every schoolboy into the Shortbread Eating Primer, or who learnt history from Our Island Story, and maths from Arithmetic Made Easy, are probably the last people to pass judgment.
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For us, the assumption that the printed word has an intrinsic value, stretching back to Gutenberg and beyond, is so deeply ingrained that it is impossible for us to imagine a school curriculum without it. We retain a visual memory of lessons learnt from the pages we have studied and the books that pile up in our collective memory. The very process by which we scrabbled through page after page of primers and encyclopaedias, or copied sums and essays into tattered exercise books, makes up the DNA of our education, and though it may be full of holes we believe that without the solid feel of a book in our hands, our learning would have been flawed.
The corollary is that an education based on information gleaned from the internet must be superficial, transitory, fallible and incomplete. My generation has a latent distrust of it, somehow believing that there is an online conspiracy to mislead us with data that is distorted or even malign. You can see it from our body language. We tend to peer suspiciously at a computer screen, a disbelieving frown on our faces; the young lounge back easily, playing the keyboard like a concert pianist, manipulating the system with suave dexterity.
Ultimately, however, what will matter more than the teaching medium is the skill with which pupils are taught. There will doubtless be, in ten years or so, a fascinating study to be made, comparing the progress of a 13-year-old Californian, trained wholly on an internet-based curriculum, and his British counterpart, still struggling home with a pile of books in his schoolbag. My prediction would be that a well-run school with a carefully balanced curriculum and a well-motivated staff will always win out over a slapdash educational outfit, however slick the computer classes or dog-eared the Shorter Latin Primer.
Both have their place. The printed book carries with it the aura of authority, of permanence, of reliability. It acts as a milestone along the road of education, and without it we have no means of checking our progress and our past achievements. But there are bad books, as there are bad websites. And the drawback of the book is that it cannot easily be updated. The internet, on the other hand, keeps pace with events and can be constantly updated. There is, however, no guarantee that it can always be relied on. It is the victim of the very events with which it is keeping pace.
Far from consigning the printed word to history, the computer generates renewed interest in it. Last year Amazon sold close on half a million of its new Kindle device. But it shifted close on 17 million printed books - a record.
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What keeps both going is the universal thirst for knowledge. As the Nobel prize-winning scientist Sir Harold Kroto told The Times last week: “Out there are a million people with a passion for some personal topic, and the desire altruistically to make it available. By making it available on a global scale [on the internet], you cover all bases.”
And the next generation seems perfectly at ease with both kinds of reading.