Blood-splattered Burgundy and Fear of the Future

I remember a pine bookcase, coffee-stained, smelling of splinters and gone-off varnish.  I remember scanning shelves with bored adolescent eyes, dismissing my parents' carefully constructed canon with the hostile indifference only bloody-minded youth can achieve.
I remember a book catching my eye.  More regal than the rest, it was bound in burgundy faux-leather and embossed with gold writing.  It had a gravity to it that intrigued me, a weight to it that made me want to touch it.
I remember reaching up and hooking its spine with my index finger, prising it forward and sliding it free with a soft sandpaper scrape.  I remember cradling its weight, stroking my hand across the cover, feeling the title's imprint.  I remember smelling it, taking pleasure in the scent of unopened, undusted stasis. 
I'm assuming I don't need to explain that smell further, every writer I know is addicted to it.
I remember opening the hardcover and taking pleasure in the soft creak of the spine opening, wetting my finger and turning the pages to a sound like a snake moving over stone.
That was the first book I ever read from choice.  'Lord of the Rings' (Ashley, whatever, you're thinking to yourself right now - SHUSH!)
It let me escape.  It took me somewhere else.  I read it into oblivion.  I read it until its spine broke and chapters fell out in clumps.  I kept it with me though dark years and it got me through.  I've bought a new copy now but that original is still on a shelf, fallen completely apart, splattered with my blood (don't ask), a symbol to me of that moment when I decided I wanted my life to be full of stories instead of tragedies.
Thinking back to that moment worries me.  I'm worried as it was the look, feel, touch, taste, smell and sound of that one book in particular that gave me the impulse to start chapter one in the first place.
With the advent of Kindles, iBooks and the like, I'm worried that we'll lose the wonder factor from reading.  Books should be tangible, real.  We'll miss the moments of shared experience the object brings, such as seeing a stranger on a bus reading one of your favourites that sparks up a conversation between you, or reading to your children from the same battered volume of Kipling that your parents read to you from when you were five.  The sheer smell of it, the sound of a darkened bedroom with your mother pausing to 'ssschlick' the page over, before continuing her soft-spoken narrative.  The sound of thirty people in a library, coughing quietly, turning pages, sniffing with repressed winter colds, maintaining silence out of respect, a vigil for the written word.
Books, books, books, books, books... Love 'em
There's a little voice that tells me, 'Snap out of it Steve. Save the rainforest, save the world.'  And I know it's right, of course.  Things done gotta be changed if we're ever going to make a go of staying alive as a species. 
But the sound of a book, of reading; libraries, not multimedia centres; paper, not iPads; the witchcraft quiet that envelopes an unfolding narrative prised from a page rather than plugging your earphones into an audiobook. 
That's going to be one of the most mourned absences from modern literature.
Thanks for readingSteve