Dear Amazon: I love books. I also love e-books. Please let me have both

Don't make me choose, Mr Amazon. Please, don't make me choose

This is a sort of open letter to Amazon. And Sony. And WH Smith, and Apple, and anybody else who makes e-readers, tablets and other electronic devices for reading books on. I have a suggestion.

I own an e-reader. Specifically, an Amazon Kindle. And I love it. I love being able to buy a book within a minute of thinking I should: now, instead of wandering past a Waterstone's six weeks later and thinking "What was it I meant to pick up?", I click a few buttons (or tap a few times at my phone) and I own it. I love taking something the size of a paperback on holiday which can hold hundreds of books, leaving me lots more room in my rucksack for my snorkel. I love that it syncs with an app on my phone, so when I'm on the Tube I can pick up whatever book I'm reading where I left off, even when my Kindle's at home. It's a wonderful piece of hardware, simple but powerful.

But, equally, I miss things. I miss seeing my new books lined up neatly on the bookshelves or teetering in great untidy piles on the dining-room table. I miss the feel and smell of new books, the physicality of them. I miss riffling back through the pages with a thumb, to check a quote or remind myself who a character is. I miss owning an object which can catch my eye, reminding me, years after I first read it, of why I loved it, and inspiring me to lift it off the shelf and read it again. These things are tied up with the physical book. None of them detract from the different pleasures and practicalities of the e-book, but they are sad losses nonetheless.

Some people who know about these things are predicting that, just as records and CDs are giving way to digital downloads, the convenience of e-books will surely win out over the nostalgia and sensory appeal of hardbacks and paperbacks. Our children, or their children, will think of books as we do cassette players or VHS: as outdated technologies. I don't know if I believe that. The bound book has survived 500 years as a widely used technology – nearly two orders of magnitude more than video tapes managed. I'm sure e-readers will become more mainstream, but books have various advantages over floppy disks or vinyl: one, they don't need a special machine to play them on, and two, they are far more likely to survive being dropped on a concrete surface or having a cup of tea spilled on them.

But whether it's true or not, books are still around, and still popular. In May, The New York Times reported that, for the first time, Amazon's e-books outsold its print editions. But that's only Amazon: overall, e-books account for just 14 per cent of book sales.

And, as we've discussed, both e-books and actual books have their own unique virtues. I just bought the entire Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series on my Kindle, read them while on holiday, and thoroughly enjoyed them: but they didn't take me back to my childhood like reading them in my yellowed old Pocket Books edition would have. I was extremely pleased to own both versions.

Which brings me to my suggestion. When I buy a new book, why not throw in a free copy of the e-book? It would be quite easy to organise: a unique, one-use code could be printed on the dust jacket of each copy, which gives the purchaser access to the e-edition. You might worry that it would reduce sales, if e-book owners started handing their free real-book copies to friends, but you could probably get around that by making it only available with hardbacks, which are ludicrously overpriced anyway. They're also inconvenient, which makes having an e-book version of them all the more appealing. Besides, it's not as if real books don't get handed around, lent to family members, and passed to charity shops and so on anyway.

As I say, I don't know whether e-books will render the book obsolete. I don't think they will. But one way to keep them marching on in harmony a bit longer would be to tie them together into a package which makes the most of their respective strengths. So, Mr Amazon, Mr Sony, everybody else: let me own both a lovely book and a handy e-book. It's really easy and would be really popular. And I would shamelessly plug it on this blog.