In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle ponders the strange pull of bibliosmia by getting his nose literally into a book

‘There is no future for e-books, because they are not books. E-books smell like burned fuel.’ So Ray Bradbury, author of the nightmare dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 about a world where books are burned, dismissed the long-term future of electronic books. And certainly, recent sales figures suggest that the traditional book is holding its own: as Rick Rylance points out in his detailed study of the value of books, Literature and the Public Good (The Literary Agenda), a UK Reading Habits survey conducted in 2015 showed that 71% of respondents didn’t use e-boos at all, and 76% preferred the traditional book to its electronic equivalent. Just 10% preferred e-books, with the remaining 14% presumably neutral. In the same year, sales of e-books dropped…