I was a relatively late convert to the e-reader, getting my Kindle five years ago when it became clear that reading 600-pages of A Suitable Boy while breastfeeding wasn’t going to work. After a frenzied few months of almost exclusive e-reading, I returned largely to the traditional printed book for a number of reasons: screen fatigue, a tendency to scrawl in margins, because I want my kids to see me reading, and because I’m a passionate supporter of bookshops and booksellers. Hachette Livre CEO Arnaud Nourry recently called ebooks “stupid” – but last summer, they changed my life.

'Ebooks are stupid', says head of one of world's biggest publishers Read more

My novel He Said/She Said, a psychological thriller about a couple who witness a rape, was a Sunday Times bestseller, but three months out of the trap, the hardback began the soft fall in sales that is the norm that period after publication. When the ebook edition began selling for 99p on Kindle for the summer, I’ll admit that I flinched, but – excluding a few days’ concession of my throne to Neil Gaiman – it topped the charts for six weeks and I was able to take my family on an overseas holiday for the first time. (On that trip, I took seven novels in a device that weighed less than a paperback, like something out of Star Trek.) I’d always had a core of loyal readers – but these numbers were something else.

The subsequent revival of my backlist was a welcome surprise. Readers have been writing to me to praise, criticise and debate; more often than not, they sign off by saying they’ve bought my other titles as ebooks. This effortless chain-reading is something hard to replicate with the physical book – very few authors can be confident of walking into any bookshop or supermarket to find their entire canon for sale. The ebook of He Said/She Said has reignited interest in my other books, and brought new readers to the novels that, in genteel publishing speak, “underperformed” at the time. I’m as grateful for that as anything.

Given that backlist especially is free money for the publisher, I’m bewildered by Nourry’s dismissal of the ebook. Of course there are caveats; Amazon’s near-monopoly of the market is worrying, and we have already reached the tipping point where competitive pricing has become a race to the bottom in which profit margins are negligible. But a stupid format? Clever books such as Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy are not dumbed down in digital. Lyra’s Oxford is just as enchanting in e-ink as when bound and typeset in carbon black.

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“It is exactly the same as print, except it’s electronic. There is no creativity, no enhancement, no real digital experience,” said Nourry. Fake news! The built-in, one-tap dictionary is a boon for Will Self fans. And as an author, I’m fascinated by the facility that shows you phrases other readers have highlighted; what is it about this sentence that resonated with dozens of humans? It’s an illicit glimpse into the one place even a writer’s imagination can never really go: readers’ minds. And Kindle’s Whispersync facility lets the reader fluidly alternate between reading a book and listening to it. What are these if not enhancements to the reading experience?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Quiet revolution … Erin Kelly Photograph: Colin McPherson/Corbis via Getty Images

And then there’s the simplest, most important enhancement of all: on any e-reader, you can enlarge the text. That in itself is a quiet revolution. Page-sniffers who dismiss ebooks out of hand are being unconsciously ableist. For decades the partially sighted were limited to the large print section of their local library, limited to only the usual, bestselling, suspects. Smaller authors might not be worth the punt and indie presses often don’t have the budget. The ability to enlarge text means that many readers are enjoying diverse voices, novels in translation, experimental short story collections – anything they want, for the first time in decades. Ebooks have given them access to a pleasure they thought they had lost along with the best of their sight. Likewise, downloadable library books are a lifeline for the housebound booklover, who may have lost their mobile library in any round of council cutbacks. The way e-readers have increased accessibility to books is not an enhancement, it’s a godsend.

Finally, Nourry claims there is no digital experience. Isn’t that the point? If it’s got graphics, noise or animation, it’s no longer a book – it’s a computer game or a movie. Just as I write disconnected from the internet and in silence, I don’t want my books to do other stuff. The beauty of the book, in a world of digital noise, is the purity of the reading experience – and there’s nothing stupid about that.