Books are about a lot of things. The way they look on shelves. The old receipt or shopping list slipped between the pages. The notes scribbled in the margin. The way a new book smells. Or an old one. The birthday message written inside.

Books are about a lot of things. The way they look on shelves. The old receipt or shopping list slipped between the pages. The notes scribbled in the margin. The way a new book smells. Or an old one. The birthday message written inside by a friend. The crinkles in the spine. The sound the pages make when you flick them quickly. The page turned down at the corner. The feel of the paper under your fingers. The Sellotape you used to fix a rip in a page. The feeling you get when you look at other people's bookshelves. And books are about words, too.

Whether the designers of the new Sony Reader agree with all or any of the above is unclear, but whether the Sony Reader succeeds or not certainly depends on how true it all is.

Certainly, the Reader has tried to imitate some of the extra pleasures of a book: you can electronically turn the page with your finger for instance, and you can scribble notes electronically, too. It is also looks a little like a book - it has a cover and is roughly the size of a paperback.

On top of that, of course, it can store up to 160 books, you can add more capacity with memory cards and users can buy more books from Waterstone's website. It has a battery life equivalent to approximately 6800 continuous page turns, enough to read War and Peace five times on a single charge. It is also pretty environmentally friendly: it uses little power other than when the reader turns a page, which means a single battery should have enough power to turn those 6800 pages. It went on sale yesterday priced £199.

Of course, the Sony Reader is not the first e-book reader - Amazon has been selling the Kindle in the US and Borders sells its own version, the Iliad - but it is the first that will be widely available in UK shops.

The thing is, though, book lovers are inherently old-fashioned - it's the old-fashionedness of books that they love. So will the Reader appeal to them? Author Nick Hornby is sceptical. "There is much consternation about the future of the conventional book," he says, "but my suspicion is that it will prove to be more tenacious than the CD. Readers of books like books."

Broadcaster Andrew Marr also has his suspicions about the Reader but is perhaps more open to persuasion. He has described his passion for books as just this side of pervy.

"All my life I've somehow assumed that simply owning books made me a better person," he says. He tried out the Iliad reader, however, and found himself reluctantly impressed, although suggested making the page-turning quicker and adding a choice of smell: musty or dank.

The British Library has also said that the gadgets are unlikely to kill off the traditional paper book. Stephen Bury, head of European and American collections, says the book lover and pleasure reader would not give up the traditional paper book for an electronic gadget.

He said: "How can you guarantee you are going to have access to the books on the Sony Reader in five or 10 years? If you've got a library of 100 hard-copy books, it's hard to lose them.

"We have books at the British Library that have been annotated by the authors or by famous people, and people are still going to want to experience that."

He did think the Sony Reader would be useful for students or businessmen who were more concerned with the content of a book than its look and feel.

Helen Fraser, managing director of Penguin, believes the Sony Reader will complement the paper book but not threaten its existence.

She said: "If you're travelling and you want to take 20 or 30 books with you, then the e-book will be really useful. The two will lie alongside each other. Ultimately, it's not the form that matters: it's the readers and writers meeting in a space."