I saw my first real-life Kindle the other day. I was on the train home from doing a bit of Christmas shopping and there she was: the woman sitting opposite me was reading an ebook, as if we were in Minority Report or something.

It is always a shock when something we have only read about in the newspaper scraps we use to line our shoes and light our fires finally makes its way to south-east London. It signals that the takeover of the innovation is nearly complete. As the carriage dimmed on its way through Sydenham Hill and this woman's face was bathed in the unearthly glow of her little electronic companion, it suddenly seemed that the end times are nigh for the printed book.

Until then, I had been avoiding confronting my feelings about the ebook debate because they are many, varied and conflicting, which are, like, my three least favourite types of feeling in the world. But there it was, in front of me – the future – and I had at last to face it.

On the one hand, it's always good to see someone reading – even if, as a small but painful amount of neck-craning revealed, it's The Divine (And Slightly Emetic) Secrets Of The Ya-Ya Sisterhood. What does it matter what format the words come in?

Well, when I read words on a screen, I don't become immersed. My mind and eyes roam, unstoppably. I feel the truth of Nicholas Carr's argument in The Shallows: How The Internet Is Changing The Way We Think, Read And Remember that "the linear, literary mind" is under assault from the web's encouragement to scan, speed-read and click. I believe that reading a book on screen just seems to bring the bad practice of one to bear on the other.

But then again, look at the paragraph above: "I believe", "I feel", everything "seems". The little I know complicates the matter. I know I'm a sentimentalist about books as objects – if not actually reading, I will happily gaze at my bookshelves, enjoying the associations and rush of memories that every spine therein sets off – and I know I'm resistant to change. And I know that the latter, particularly, is a failing that needs to be overcome, or at the very least controlled.

So let's try. Ebooks are good because... they are cheaper, easier to access and less intimidating for many whose chosen haunts are not bookshops. I had a conversation once with the children's author Francesca Simon, who recalled giving a talk in a bookshop to a group of children from a deprived area and not being able to get their attention because they were so jittery. "I suddenly realised," she said, "that we had put them in an environment that was as alien and uncomfortable for them as a betting shop would be to me." If cyberspace frees potential readers from such shackles, who am I to stand wailing about the loss of the occasional Proustian rush via paperback?

When I got home and checked my email (aren't we having quite the cross-platform, multimedia fest this column!), I found one from a man named Jeremy Carson who is about to launch the Campaign for Real Books in order to protect this possibly dying medium. The idea is that members can join for £15 a year and will receive a 10% discount on all purchases over £10 that they make at any participating independent or secondhand booksellers. He hopes it will stop books going the way of vinyl and CDs, and that Cambo (as it shall be known for short) can do for the printed word what the Campaign for Real Ale has done for pints of Old Toejam – raised its profile and made it palatable to younger generations.

I'm going to join, of course. But I'm also going to keep trying to open my mind to ebooks. Though I can tell you now, they'll never have my heart.