The Kindle has turned me off paper books

It was the second lead story on The News at Ten. JK Rowling, it seems, had just been unmasked as the author of a pseudonymous thriller, The Cuckoo's Calling, under the name Robert Galbraith. By the time the newsreader was on item three, I was on page three. Kindles are perfect for speedy delivery: 30 seconds between desire and fulfilment.

I was delighted to have the new text on my screen, having no desire to schlep it about in hard copy. Schlep it about? This is a book were talking about, right? Not a suitcase. There is nothing cumbersome about most books, is there? Admittedly, they can be inconvenient – if you want to read one in the middle of the night, you have to turn on the bedside lamp, and risk irritating your loved one. (Back-lit e-readers are not yet universal, but it's getting that way.) And too many books are a positive encumbrance if you are travelling, and want to take enough reading matter to cover your holiday, without paying for excess baggage.

My intention was to read the new thriller, a few days later, on my way to New York. But two things intervened: first, and predictably, I finished it before we left. Rather good, I thought: edgy one-legged private investigator and his temporary secretary with her inner sleuth unfurling. I preferred it to Rowling's debut adult novel, A Casual Vacancy, which is neatly told, if a bit clunky, bloody and bleak. Voldemortification in the shires.

Second, as I discovered on our way to Heathrow, I had forgotten to take my Kindle. This has never happened to me before, for it is now so essential that I almost buy it a companion ticket. When it became clear, checking my bags for the third time, that I was now Kindle-less, I had a reaction so acute as to qualify, almost, as an anxiety attack. No Kindle? What was I going to do?

The answer, of course, was pathetically obvious. I went to the airport shop, bought a Kate Atkinson thriller which would see me through to New York, where I could surely replenish my reading stocks. But my unease didn't abate entirely, and though I spent six hours in the excellent company of Ms Atkinson, I never got comfortable with her. It has been a few years since I read an actual book on a plane, and I was astonished at how cumbersome, how intractably wrong, it felt in my hands. I found myself – which I have never done before and heartily disapprove of – folding the book in half so that only the page I was reading was visible. That gave me a cramp in my right hand, and the pages wouldn't stay still, quite, as I read. I found myself swaying slightly, as if at the Wailing Wall. Then I went back to the two-handed double-page-opened position – even describing it makes it seem like an obscure sort of manoeuvre, rather than a natural function – but I still couldn't settle down. The book was too fat. It was too heavy. It spread out too widely. It was as if I had taken an unruly small pet onto the plane and couldn't keep it under control.

Never again. I would even prefer to watch a tiny film on one of those seat telly thingies than read a book on a plane. We are going to Australia and New Zealand for seven weeks in November and December, and I will stuff my Kindle with lots of treats, and check obsessively that it is in my carry-on luggage. (The occasion for the trip is that I have been invited to deliver a lecture at a rare books library).

My wife Belinda and I went, last weekend, to the summer fayre at a local village hall near us in the New Forest. I like to support such events, but find it difficult once I actually get there, because it is so depressing. It was a homely occasion, with cups of stewed tea and pink iced cakes, local schoolchildren dancing, various games to play at which you lose 30p, local jams and chutneys for sale, and stalls stuffed with old teapots, odd cups and saucers, chipped figurines, and knick-knacks among which even Belinda (who has a great eye) couldn't locate anything worth buying.

I threw away my spare change on the games, and was turning to go back to the car when I noticed, across the way, a table lined with rows of bulky, multi-coloured objects. I wandered over, in a state of some bemusement, unclear what I was seeing.

Oh: Books. Rows of paperbacks, with their spines facing upwards. But my sense of dislocation didn't go away just because I could name the obscure objects, not quite. Perhaps I had been looking for too long at the depressing stalls of brocante, at too many ugly bits of junk? Because even when I started to examine the rows of paperbacks, and to find a number of titles that I would like to read – a couple of Stephen Kings, a Harlan Coben – the emerging sensation sharpened and defined itself: the books still looked cumbersome, dusty, and weighty. Undesirable. They were unappealing, not because they were used, but because they were books.

This rather shocked me, and I wandered off in a state of some perturbation. What? All of a sudden I find books fusty and old-fashioned? Can it possibly be the case generally – as it was particularly with Mr Galbraith's new thriller – that I would now much rather download? I still buy a lot of hard copy books. I divide my purchases between titles that are serious (and which I might want to annotate, reread, lend to friends, shelve) and those that I want the simple pleasure of reading once. But am I slipping towards a gradual abandonment of a form that I have loved? Of the pleasures of opening covers, leafing back and forth, the physical sensation of the turning of the page? Could this astonishing transformation of my tastes happen so quickly, sneak up on me when I wasn't looking?

And: if so, how much do I care? How much should I?

At the fayre, I made a note of the King and Coben titles I wanted, went home and downloaded them for my trip in November. I can probably read two or even three thrillers on our flight to Sydney to give my lecture.

The title of the lecture? "The Life and Death of the Book".