That book you are holding in your hand while sitting on the bus or waiting on a friend in a cafe is more than just a work of literature. It's a mini-advertisement for who you are. The book jacket tells others instantly that you are a Jane Austen kind of girl, a Dave Eggers kind of guy. It can reveal your taste in music, the things you worry about, or the recipe you will be trying for the very first time when you get home.

But with the launch of Apple's iPad in Australia, along with the fleet of dedicated electronic reading devices — the Kindle, Kobo, Nook and iLiad — already available, that subtle broadcasting of tastes, preferences, even personality will begin to disappear. E-readers display no cover image or title. You will be identifiable only as an early adopter, an e-reader kind of person.

But what does the march of technology mean for book designers? For decades their alchemical arrangements of font, colour and image have been responsible for hooking bookshop browsers to a book. We see a cover – or just a book spine – among thousands of others and something about it implores us to pick it up. Once held, the cover, the weight and texture of the paper, the cut of the pages — even its smell — does the rest.

On the virtual bookshelf, however, the jacket design is reduced to a thumbnail jpeg, one of millions of pixelated images in an online bookstore. Is this the beginning of the end for book designers?

Yes and no, says Zoe Sadokierski, a designer and judge of the Australian Publishers Association's Book Design Awards, held recently. Book cover design as we know it, may become redundant for e-readers, though the design of the pages themselves will become more important. Designers around the world are already updating their skills.