Already the owner of a London chain of bookstores, Daunt was passionate about the appeal of the printed book but equally realistic about the threats it faces, accusing some publishers of letting quality slide.

"Do the publishers face challenges, particularly in the digital world in which the territorial rights and copyrights and so on are clearly much more difficult to enforce? Yes," he said. "Do I think that the publishers perhaps need to reexamine some of the basics of their industry to get that right? For example I think that the attention to the physical quality of the book has been lax; they have not recognised that it is as important as it is."

However, he said the rise of digital books was inevitable, particularly in markets where being able to update content, or make that content interactive, added real value to the work.

"Yes the digital book will take a large-ish proportion, we don't know how big that will be, but I expect it's nowhere near as big as some of the pundits are predicting, in particular those within the industry.

"The glee with which publishers and agents and authors and the like expect it to take over is driven primarily by a commercial excitement at the benefits that will flow to them.

"I think in some categories it will be especially large and a university press is exactly the sort of one where it will. But in consumer publishing, I don't think so, and Penguin has gone up to roughly 6% in the UK, double that maybe reaching towards the 20s for some in the US, which is clearly where we may be heading but it's not 50% or 80% or anything like that," he said.

"And I also wonder whether we might row back in terms of the digital reading experience, which I've used a lot - it is quite alluring. You get this nice bit of plastic and all of us are susceptible to new bits of plastic but actually you don't have any physical residue.

"You don't have that physical book at the end of it, and for me the great books that I've read, and the books that I treasure, part of it is the physical book that remains with me. It's the feel of it, the weight of it, the typeface, the cover, the paper. I know this all sounds extraordinarily fuddy duddy but I really passionately believe that.

"I would argue absolutely vehemently that the physical book will not die. Will the physical bookshop survive is a more troublesome question and I think the honest answer to that is no, not unless it's good enough."

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