A little bit of Free Thinking:
Is the book dead?

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Will printed paper or powered screens be the way we read in the future, and will this make any difference to the way we read, or even the way we write?

Ahead of BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking festival at The Sage Gateshead in November, an expert panel, including David Almond (author of the prize-winning novel Skellig), crime writer Louise Welsh, Chris Meade of the Institute for the Future of the Book and Head of Heritage Collections at Durham University Dr Sheila Hingley, meet to discuss the future of reading in front of a live audience of avid readers.

As yet another way to read books electronically is launched onto the market - and one that experts predict will make this a mainstream activity - some are concerned that innovations like the iPad impede our imagination, shorten our attention span and make us intellectually shallow, while others argue that they do precisely the opposite.

The popularity of print-on-demand books available online suggest that there is still a huge appetite for reading a physical book, even when a digital version is easily available from the same source. So can digital books enhance our reading experience or do they diminish it?