The digital revolution has only just started.

As Amazon announced recently, the ebook is king. Just two years after the Kindle was introduced, ebook sales now outstrip those of traditionally printed books, a consumer revolution which has authors, publishers, traditionalists and bookshops chewing their nails down to the quick.

And readers? Well, they are quite happy, or should be. The cost of an ebook is a fraction of a printed book, and you can download it at home without the bother and hassle of a city centre shopping trip. What’s not to like?

Apparently Kindle readers are buying four times as many books as they were before owning the device, prompting Amazon to comment that “Generally there seems to be … a love of a reading and a renaissance as a result of Kindle being launched.”

However, whether this is as good news as is being claimed is open to some doubt. Scottish author Ewan Morrison has written cogently about the perils of self-publishing for the ebook market, and while it may very well be true that people are reading more as a result of the digital revolution, there remains a question as to the quality of what they are consuming.

As I’ve said in a previous blog, it does actually matter what you read. Reading is brain-food. So ideally, readers should have a rich diet of varied reading, ranging from the trivial and entertaining to the weightier and more profound end of literature. Like any human experience, why wouldn’t you want to sample the very best on offer, along with everything else?

As it happens, I’m not a great fan of Kindle reading myself, but that’s a personal choice. After all, I’m a 48-year-old man who from an early age became addicted to printer’s ink. I’m hardly the target market for devices of this kind.

But I am interested in the digital revolution and where it is going to lead us. The Kindle is just a very small tip of an enormous iceberg, because the digital revolution has hardly started.

Last week I was in Glasgow speaking to one of Scotland’s top digital content producers, who showed me on his iPad his digital re-imagining of John Buchan’s The 39 Steps. And as we made our way through the book, visually, as it were, two thoughts occurred to me.

The first is that the digital revolution will utterly transform learning and education, because it is now possible to embed educational experiences and content into a story like The 39 Steps – or pretty much any other for that matter.

For example, the London room that Richard Hannay stays in at the beginning of the novel has, in this digital version, a map of the world on the wall, showing the extent of the British Empire.

Click on the map, and you open a gateway to a mass of information about the world in 1914 which helps the learner understand more about the original context of the story, including history, politics and society.

This is a relatively trivial example, but I hope illustrative of the power of this medium to excite, inform and entertain learners through means which are far from traditional.

We are now used to the idea that people learn in different ways, so one of the further virtues of the digital revolution is that it finally enables us to deliver learning in styles that can be customised to most suit the individual learner. Those who wish to get a fuller idea of what the current technology is able to deliver should check out Faber & Faber’s treatment of TS Eliot’s The Wasteland for iPads. It’s awesome.

The second thing that occurred to me concerned the future of fiction. While I believe that the book itself will survive, I think many fiction-makers of the future will make use of new technologies to create incredible immersive experiences for us.

You may think it is a little too sci-fi, but I am convinced that the fiction book of the future will be a story the ‘reader’ will walk through, and experience in an utterly convincing virtual sense. The reader will actually be inside the world of the book choosing how they proceed through it, and how they consume the story.

Could such consumers still be regarded as ‘readers’ though? And what does this mean for the sacred, brain-healthy contract that exists between a simple line of text and the reader’s imagination? I’d be interested to hear anybody’s thoughts!