For shame, I do declare I hear a weeping and a wailing and a gnashing of teeth from the depths of Old Fogey. After decades of refining the art of deep-crust protectionism, their ramparts have been breached. Those nasty techie-types have mined their way underneath the foundations and the walls are beginning to crack.

Am I talking Wikileaks? Publishing all the embarrassing secrets of the great and good and threatening to storm the firmly locked gates of the establishment?

No. I'm talking e-books. But don't ask me to shed a tear for the publishers and booksellers who are trying to resist the new book formats. They have been failing to invest in the future for decades. So small wonder they don't have one.

E-books enable the long-suffering author (even the non-tech-savvy author, thanks to the good offices of Smashwords) to distribute their books direct to the reader. We don't need agents and printers telling us what can be published and what can't. We don't need bookshops. We certainly don't need book distributors. No longer do we need to waste small forests printing books for pulp.

What we need is what we have always needed. Good writers. Good editors. Good channels to market that actually understand that their job is to SELL THE BOOK. Not simply pile shelves with stuff by celebs that sells itself, or work a scam to make money from truckloads of waste paper.

Well, I know some good writers. Know a few good editors. I'm still waiting for the channels to market.