Media: A Moment with Marquis.(online information services and mass media business analysis)

It's all Alan Rusbridger's fault. He introduced me to abebooks.com. Now I'm a hopeless addict.

Abebooks is to second-hand books what Amazon is to new. It is the online equivalent of the Charing Cross Road. This very morning, a jiffy bag arrived containing a 70-year-old book from abebooks.com for not very much from a bookseller in Scotland: first edition, signed by the author, in immaculate condition. It is the most delightful object.

The content is interesting (the main reason I ordered it), but the book itself is a wonderful thing. It is obscenely tactile; the cloth cover is velvety to the touch, the print a typographer's joy, the paper a creamy ...

My little book and the way I acquired it seem to me to shed encouraging light on one of today's most often-asked media questions: is the internet the death-knell for print?

In countless ways, we have become accustomed to doing stuff digitally. We bank, we shop, we book flights, we e-mail rather than mail, we fill in tax returns, we look at news online where once we did these things exclusively with printed material.

No-one seriously believes that for thousands of day-to-day transactions and needs we will ever regress to paper. But that is different from saying there is no future role for printed matter.

Just as the advent of television did not, as was widely ...