There's a pervasive arrogance in the approach of technologists to books. Every new wave of technology arrives with its techno-prophets, assuring us we'll no longer have to deal with those fusty old book things and their tiresome words. In the future all novels will be interactive multimedia experiences.

The latest omen was the shining touch-screen of the iPad. Surely this would finally kill the dull old book dead? A wave of highly trumpeted interactive ebook apps appeared, followed by the rather less well-publicised losses of the app developers, who had invested in technology that added little or nothing to the reading experience.

In recent months, John Buchan's Thirty-Nine Steps and poor old Winnie the Pooh have been given the interactive treatment, but only became more not less dull than their non-interactive forbears. Maybe we, the readers, just aren't smart enough to see the value in interaction that is obvious to groups of twenty-something app developers.

As a culture we've bought in to the idea that these bits of silicon and glass designed in California and churned out of sweatshops in China are the absolute bees' knees. I make my regular pilgrimage to the Apple store like everyone else. But the persistent failure of the book to die in the face of technology suggests that not all is quite as it seems.

We're in the process of shifting the book from paper page to digital screen, but what we actually choose to read are still chunks of text, around 100,000 words long give or take, which start at the beginning and finish at the end. No branching interactive story lines. No embedded multimedia widgets. And definitely no chance for the reader to mess it up by doing something silly. Or worse, mundane.

Ah, but video games! Video games can throw us in to a 3D digital world where we can live out any story we want. But we already live in a sand-box reality that gives us infinite creative potential, and how much of a mess are most of us making of that? We end up trapped working in call centres in Croydon and manning the smithy in Skyrim.

So we turn to people whose imagination can shape something greater than our own – the writer. I truly believe everyone has a book in them, but very few people spend decades in lonely hard work learning to write it. Writers do. That's why they're sometimes a little cracked, like hermited monks brought down from the mountain to impart their wisdom to the masses.

Which might explain why there doesn't seem to be a single decent writer working in video games. Whenever I say thiss, people shout things like Mass Effect and Bioshock at me and I play them and they are about as well-written as an episode of Star Trek. Which isn't awful, but neither is it great. It's just functional.

Being a writer is much harder than being a coder. Because you are working with a language far more complex, nuanced and potentially powerful than Javascript. It's running on the hardware of the human brain, the product of evolution itself, and an operating system that makes iOS 7 look like a Casio calculator – human consciousness.

A book is an app written in the raw language of the mind that interfaces the reader with the powerful imagination of a great writer. That reader-writer relationship is interactive in the truest sense – the pure interaction of one imagination with another. But it's also hard work. You have to learn to read and you have to read a lot. It doesn't happen if you just sit and twiddle your thumbs, unlike video games.

All the bells and whistles of digital interactivity do is get in the way of the language. Stopping the reader to ask what they want to do is about as enhancing as barging invto a darkened cinema with a flashlight. When it comes to novels, the only job of an iPad is to provide a convenient platform to read on, then get the hell out of the way and let the language do its work.