In comparing books and electronic text, the author Malcolm Bradbury was spot on when he said that if matches had been invented after cigarette lighters, we'd have marvelled at the improvement. Most of the propaganda, dazzled by newness, states that electronic text is a change comparable to the invention of printing and that it is already nearly completed. It ignores the fact that shifts in consciousness take generations and such rhetoric falls into the trap of chronocentricity, the egotism that one's own generation sits on the very cusp of history.

Take this treasure from Mighty Micro, a book from 1979: 'The 1980s will see the book as we know it, and as our ancestors created and cherished it, begin a slow and steady slide to oblivion.' So far, so wrong. Reading anything lengthy on a screen is such a miserable experience that most never do it and, in any case, the organisation of what resides in computers encourages people to dip into text.

Techno-proselytisers have extracted virtue here by claiming that inherent flightiness leads to new forms of narrative and imaginative space. But there's nothing new about 'non- linearity'. Lots of books have never been read from beginning to end — most religious texts, dictionaries and poetry collections spring to mind. What is new is not so much the branching of electronic text as that computers don't invite the joined-up thinking of reading anything in its entirety.