Jon Meek has half the collection of Arthur Conan Doyle in his pocket – and he’s not even too fussed if he gets round to reading them all.

“I’m terrible. I’ve often got three books on the go, but at least you have a choice,” says Jon, 31 who has the books all downloaded to his Sony Touch e-reader.

“It’s good to know they are there, just in case you’re in the mood.”

Sitting on a bench in Shrewsbury Square, nose in an e-book, he cuts an increasingly familiar sight as increasing numbers of modern bookworms get turned on to downloading their favourite reads to a hand-held digital reader, or even to their mobile phone.

Last year just over 24 million traditional books were sold in the UK. That may sound like a lot, but it is 10 per cent fewer than the year before and the trend shows no sign of reversing.

In the US, for the first time the e-book is outselling its dusty, paper forebear, and experts say the same pattern is happening on these shores, albeit at a slower pace as book readers in the UK are more reluctant to embrace technology – especially technology that which is making an old friend – the book itself – obsolete.

But parallels with the way we will consume the latest Harry Potter can be drawn with the way we purchase music. Once we were vinyl junkies, then CD clingers, and finally we are downloading our Phil Collins from the internet, and from iTunes in particular.

The benefits of e-books and e-readers such as the Kindle, iPad or Sony Touch reader are clear. Like an iPod for books, you can store thousands of your favourite paperbacks and hardbacks on them, a library at your fingertips. Beach reading becomes a painful choice of whatever takes your fancy, and no more lugging three or four sizeable and hefty works to your bit of sand.

One aspect that is perhaps slowing our decent into e-reading is the price of downloading our favourite tomes. In many cases they are still more expensive than their page-turning ancestors.

And of course we have the initial outlay of the technology – the iPad or Kindle or whichever hand-held reader we chose. But prices here are coming down rapidly too, just as all technological gadgets become cheaper the more people buy them. These days you can buy a Kindle for £111 and the Sony Touch reader, which allows you to download books from most e-book stores, has been on offer through Waterstones in Shrewsbury at around the same price.

So is there any hope for the old fashioned book?

Ros Westwood, manager of Oxfam book and music shop in Shrewsbury, thinks so. Certainly it’s not the last chapter for the good old paper book just yet.

“I can’t see that, not just yet. People say that you lose the feeling and handling of a real book, as well as the smell of a new or old book,” she says.

“But I like science fiction and Star Trek and I remember watching Deep Space Nine years ago and Worf, one of the Cling-ons, was reading a book on a hand-held device – and now it’s real, but there is nothing quite like reading a proper book.

“My sister’s husband bought her a Kindle because he thinks she has too many books. She had a go at reading with it, but she cannot part with her books.”

It is reading weather in the centre of Shrewsbury. A lovely spring day, the sun high in a blue sky and cafes with outside tables are full of people reading books and newspapers.

Among them is 35-year Katrina Watkinson who, midway through a thick paperback, admits to being on a bit of a cliffhanger, a conundrum between technological and paper reads.

“I read on the computer, you can download books free from certain sites and read them in Word,” she says.

“I used to be stuck in my ways, I would like to hold a book and my husband would download, but I’m coming round to the idea, especially as the prices of e-books will come down.

Normal

“I can see a time where if the Kindle, or e-book, becomes a lot more normal, then reading a book will be odd.”

Dan Atkinson, manager of Currys electrical store in Shrewsbury’s Pride Hill Shopping Centre, has seen a big rise in sales of e-book readers, in particular the new Kindle, which is thinner and lighter than ever.

“Since the new Kindle came out we’ve been selling lots,” he says.

“You also get thousands of free books through Amazon and the price of e-books when you buy them is coming down – and the more people that have them the bigger the reduction in cost will be, I think, and it will be cheaper for the downloads.”

Dan likens the trend towards digital reading to the move away from vinyl records and CDs to online downloads to MP3 players and iPods. It’s inevitable, he says.

“You can get 3,500 books on a Kindle,” says Dan.

“Now, if you go on holiday you might take five or six books, and all the space that takes up, whereas if you have a reader like this you have got a mini library to hand.”

And he believes it’s only a matter of time before we follow US bookworms to digital bookstores, where another factor is the virtual elimination of a carbon footprint: no need to drive to town; no need to recycle paper for book production.

Jon Meek, who works in Waterstones bookshop in High Street, Shrewsbury, says: “I read a lot of history books and as well as being big and heavy they can be quite expensive in paper form, but you can download them a lot cheaper.

“I can see e-books becoming as popular here as they are in the US eventually,” he says.

“The biggest feedback I get is how new readers thought they would not get on with the idea, but it’s amazing how quickly they get used to it.

“A lot of older readers like it because they find it hard to get large print books but you can just zoom in with these, and it’s great for students because a lot of the text books they use are out of copyright and can be downloaded free.

“And it’s great for new authors because they can potentially put their work on the internet and people can download it.”

Of course, for millions of people the e-book format may never be able to match the romanticism, feel and even smell of opening an old fashioned book.

Adds Jon: “Now if only there was an ‘app’ that mimicked the smell of a book . . .”