We live in an age of digitally facilitated convenience. It can be argued that we no longer need the CD, the DVD or the book yet we have all three. The music, film and publishing industries are all historic and titanic industries, and all are adapting to the digital age differently.

We used to listen to cassettes, and watch VHS, both of which are long forgotten, with technological evolution ultimately deciding when a platform becomes anachronistic. The difference between books and CDs/DVDs is that the while the book and the magazine have adapted to survive their new counterpart, the e-reader, the disk as a whole has not.

Many have argued that the book, the newspaper or the magazine will suffer the same digital shift, and I believe that in literature, like music and film, a time will come when the digital simply becomes easier. But why it is happening more slowly than music? It is because the sensory experience of reading is changing. With music, barring the increase in quality, you interact with the media in the same way, using headphones, speakers, et cetera, but with an e-reader you are interacting with your media in a different format. It’s still words, but you are reading them from a screen rather than a page.

Therefore due to the resistance of the sensory change in the nature of reading, the digital hurrah of e-reading has arrived and reached a plateau for at least our generation. While many of the largest publishing houses announced a rise in profits in 2013 against expectations, I expect book sales to diminish over the next 10 years, with public libraries, those greenhouses of nostalgia, being the first true casualty.

CDs, like books, do possess a sense of authenticity and elicit pride of ownership in a way that the DVD typically does not. I mean, who doesn’t remember their first CD? (Mine was Sum 41’s All Killer No Filler) Or their favourite children’s book? (The Hungry Caterpillar). However, this connection we feel to the disk, reflected in a recent upturn in Vinyl sales, is not greater than the sum of the convenience of downloading music or film.

While record stores are closing rapidly, the digital film and music markets have been cornered between iTunes, Amazon and illegal downloads, and have become more accessible and popular than ever before. The music and film industries, while still threatened at the grassroots level by mass piracy and the faceless automaton that is modern marketing, are on the whole in decent health, but it is the disks that they are sold on that will surely perish. Even the CEO of HMV, the high street CD bastion, estimates that by 2016 they will no longer be selling CDs or DVDs.

While disks will go first, literature will undoubtedly go the same way. But for now it is enjoying what can perhaps be imagined as their lap of honour in terms of sales before retreating to make way for the digital expansion.