I've just caught up with the BBC's Imagine "Books - The Last Chapter?" and half-enjoyed it. Who knew, for example, that book-sniffing could be a career option?

The show, which featured Alan Yentob reading under a tree and an interview with a man who had chewed a book, sought to look at whether digital books would usurp the 'traditional book' and what that might mean. It had as its premise that the print book was on the way out, and that this was something to mourn. The original sub-title of the show was "The End of the Affair", but was changed to the "The Last Chapter". Either way, if that is your starting point then you are likely to make a feature that fetishises print, rather than one that looks at how the book might evolve.

A second flaw was that it forgot to include the reader in its analysis. It was an odd miss. Consumer objects don't change in isolation. We've been capable of producing e-books for 20 years, but the shift is happening now because readers are receptive to the change and they finally have a device that is affordable, a platform that is easy to buy from, and content that is readily available. Readers may or may not feel sentimental towards print books, as was one question posed during the programme, but the facts are that they are turning to digital reading in droves. Why? Well to paraphrase Douglas Adams, who said all this years ago, they care more about the food than about the plate.

In this respect some of the arguments felt very rehearsed: Mike Shatzkin had the look of a man running out of patience with his interrogator, while 'the industry', represented by Gail Rebuck, Ed Victor, and author Ewan Morrison, was captured in a moment of mutual dependency: "we all need each other", was the refrain. True, but tell that to Joe Konrath. Or Amazon, which barely got a mention.

Typically Farenheit 451 turned up at one point, but Yentob managed to mangle the point, by saying that that though books were banned (and burnt), rebels had learned them off by heart to preserve them. The "them" here was ambiguous, but since Yentob was carrying a physical copy of the book the implication was not. But in the Bradbury classic it is the other way round: the rebels are not part of a print preservation movement, they are protecting the content not the package. Had Bradbury offered them a Kindle they'd have jumped for joy.

Ok, look, it's great the Beeb devoted an hour of prime-time to a discussion on the death of the book, and I'm guessing I'm not its target audience, but can we now have an hour devoted to the future of the book? If they try really hard I'd expect they could even find someone who has eaten a Kindle.

Twitter responses to the programme have been somewhat less forgiving,  but I thought them worth preserving.

@tambourine  
so basically this is just the usual broadsheet "thinkpiece" about ebooks that engages with none of the important issues

@PhilipArdagh
Well, that was an hour or so of my life I won't be getting back

@nuttyxander
REAL BOOKS KLAXON I've been selling fakes, clearly

@nuttyxander
Well that was the most impressively content free hour of TV I've watched in a while.  DISCLAIMER: I don't watch talent shows

@ros_clarke
You know, I watch a lot of trashy TV. None of it feels like as big a waste of licence fees as this nonsense

@ros_clarke
Okay, a directory of the scents of books in a library is plain weird. It'll be a good thing if ebooks put paid to that

@LisasShare
Lots of chatter about #thelastchapter but I'm sure it won't contain any original arguments. Great stories do not die; form changes. End of