Sales of consumer ebooks plunged 17 percent in the UK in 2016, according to the Publishers Association.

Sales of physical books and journals went up by seven percent over the same period, while children's books surged 16 percent. The same trend is on display in the US, where ebook sales declined 18.7 percent over the first nine months of 2016.

According to the Association of American Publishers, paperback sales were up 7.5 percent over the same period, and hardback sales increased 4.1 percent.

Some of this might be due to the death of tablets and e-readers which turned out not to be the game changing hardware that the Tame Apple Press and Steve Jobs told us.

Sales of e-readers declined by more than 40 percent between 2011 and 2016, according to consumer research group Euromonitor International.

"E-readers, which was once a promising category, saw its sales peak in 2011. Its success was short-lived, as it spiralled downwards within a year with the entry of tablets," Euromonitor said in a research note.

One of the things we have noticed in research book sales is that people are grabbing PDF versions of books and never reading them. But in any case, it does look like the traditional book has another few hundred years life left in it.