I learned to read when I was five. Since then, I have been reading between 3-6 books per month. I have crossed rapiers with the Comte de Rochefort, barely survived the mines of Moria, and emptied bottle after bottle with Henri Chinaski. I travelled to the moon and back, sailed up the Congo on a steamer together with Marlow and defeated all of Ramona’s evil exes. All this with the help of dog-eared paperbacks read on the bus from Barcelona to Arles, spotless first editions dedicated to me by my grandparents in flawless handwriting, and blotched and tattered books from the library read under my blanker at night when I could not sleep. But.

I’ve started to write for a living two years ago. I am not a published author in the classical sense. All my writings (except a few newspaper articles here and there) appear online. But.

I do not possess an Ipad or a Kindle, but have downloaded an e-reader app for my Iphone, which has three books stored on: The War of the Worlds, A Tale of two Cities and Napoleon of Notting Hill. I consider it as a back-up, in case life finds me stranded somewhere without a book or a paperback and I’ll have to read something. But.

These last days (as the London Book Fair was happening), I’ve read loads of articles on the state of the publishing industry and printed books and the internet. In the best light I would consider myself as an emerging writer, in the worst case as someone with too much time on his hands who puts up words on the internet. But sometimes I find myself in some kind of limbo. I would give anything to see a book that I wrote appear in print, complete with a cover with my name. But ordering it via lulu.com seems treason to me, even though I have 80,000 words sitting in a folder on my hard drive. I want to follow up the traditional ways of getting a book into print, finding an agent, have my manuscript shopped around while nervously sipping beer at home. All the while asking myself “why?”, as I’m writing a blogpost that is up on the web in realtime, open for immediate feedback and consumption and not needing the added layers of agent and publisher.

So what will become of books (and new writers)? I have been a musician for over ten years, so I assume the same fate as Vinyl will befall books. Some people will still prefer the smell of second hand bookshops, will buy first and second and third editions with different covers, and will read to their grandchildren from dirty dusty fable collections. Other people who read Dan Brown and Rosamunde Pilcher will download the books to their portable devices or watch the movie-version on TV, just as they will watch the X-Factor and buy the CD. No wonder we have large bookstore-chains closing and independent bookstores opening up and growing stronger.

Will I keep writing (and reading) on, until some far far away day I’ll hold my first book in my hands, published by a publishing house that is not me? Hellyeah. Will I ever make a living from this? Hellno. But then I prefer to write copy over days and stories at night, because it makes me happy. And as long as I know where I can buy books to scrabble around in them to mark passages worth quoting and re-reading, and chat with the people behind the counter about David Foster Wallace before I bring the books home, I’m happy. I’ve never been a guy for the X-Factor anyway.