STEVE is a tall, American greybeard, who also happens to be a practising Buddhist.

At the same time he is quite possibly one of the friendliest booksellers who works at Waterstone's, in New George Street.

He is always willing to help if you are stuck for a book and looking for a good read. After all, even for the most jaundiced reader there has to be at least one volume that will make you perk up and pay attention.

So there am I trudging around the shelves on the second floor of Waterstone's, and I still can't find any thing to tickle the old mental process.

I've spent far too long already prowling the shelves; so long that I'm beginning to look like a little bit of a permanent fixture.

Philosophy: nothing I fancy there. History: nothing doing there. Travel: don't really want to go anywhere anyhow. Science: my genes already feel that they've been spliced. So now I am stuck.

Steve now begins to wave volumes at me: but nothing from the sport section is doing it.

His hand gesticulates over several lovely hardback volumes in the nature section on wolves and bears. He would like to see grizzlies introduced to Dartmoor, to make the Ten Tors and Duke Of Edinburgh award scheme a little bit more challenging. But I'm still not on the uptake.

To be honest I've always hated these kinds of day where you cannot make up your mind. There are hundreds of volumes in this shop, and my mind is blank.

Sometimes I wonder if I would be better off if I just bought an e-reader device like a Kindle. There would be no more traipsing around books shops trying to make up my mind if there was any thing worth reading or not. I could just download everything from the interweb and be done with it.

But this is the problem. Downloading is not the same as a book. It will never have the same texture or feel.

An electronic file on one of these devices will never gather dust in the sense that a book does on a book shelf. To me, there's something so wrong with these electronic gadgets.

They are expensive objects. Just to begin reading, I would have to shell out something between £89-£149, just to buy a basic unit.

In printed book terms, if we assume that the price of a paperback novel is a nice round £10, then the price of one of the most popular e-readers is the equivalent of nearly 15 novels.

In the long term, this means the price of the book is superior to that of the e-reader.

The printed book is the cheaper form of reading and I will not require the a unit to begin reading in the first place. Pick book up, open cover, begin to read.

Plus the book itself is easier on the eyes. The screen of these devices, like computer monitors, makes the eyes a lot more tired then the pages of a book.

I want to do able to read, rather then fall asleep all the time from the glare of the screen.

Then there is the case of having to charge the unit, which takes time and money – the money this time going to an electricity company. This is something you never have to do with a book.

Once more, pick book up; open cover and begin to read.

What could be more easier then opening a book and reading. You don't even have to download anything in the first place.

This means that you don't have to spend even more money and time on a slow internet connection, to begin downloading an electronic file in the first place.

The book, in reality, is a money-saving device. And unless you get it wet, it does not fail, crash or go blank, or do other silly things that e-readers and computers are prone to do.

I'd rather buy a book than an electronic file any day of the week. The book is really the most amazing thing that humanity has ever created.

Because of this I still find myself walking around bookshops looking for something to read. With booksellers, like Steve, finding volumes for me.

In the end my eye passes over a certain book, and I think to myself that this might well be it. It's a book about reading and the British Army, or at least trying to read in a tent in Afghanistan after having been on patrol.

So I walk out of the shop after buying a copy of Patrick Hennessy's The Junior Officers' Reading Club, knowing that at least I will not have to download it.

The staff at Waterstone's have now got rid of me, at least until I finish this book.