After a nervous start, I’m now addicted to e-books to the point where Amazon’s one-click ordering system may as well be an open pipe to my bank account.

The nerves weren’t anything to do with the concept, but with the first book on my order list: a collection of Robert Bringhurst’s poetry.

Why the angst? Well, Bringhurst is one of my favourite writers, and the author one of my favourite books, The Elements of Typographic Style.

This is a beautiful book, and as elegant in design and appearance as it is in content. It’s about much more than typography, of course.

But it is about typography, and I felt peculiarly guilty ordering one of his books in digital form. I still haven’t got it.

As I said, though, I am now e-booking with a vengeance. For a start, lots of the books are free. There’s the excellent Project Gutenberg collection and Google Books, of course, but Kindle also offers plenty of free books.

If it moves, tax it…
But – and here’s the point of this post – I don’t understand why the e-books that aren’t free attract VAT, unlike printed books. This is clearly anomalous – it’s the result of an outdated definition of what a book is (and of the state’s rapacious desire to grab what it can where it can).

If it stops moving, subsidise it…
And the consequences of this anomaly are a de facto subsidy for print at the expense of digital, and a cost burden for hard-pressed school university libraries, where a massive move to e-books clearly makes sense.

The argument is well put here, and, as you’ll see from the date, it’s longstanding.

So join the tax-cutters, on this at least.

Write to your MP ASAP.