Columnist Rachel Beckett is a Stroud-based writer and thinker who is concerned about making the world a better place.

An author, publisher and mother, Rachel will be sharing her thoughts with readers every month.

IT WOULD be hard to conceive a more satisfying product than the book – tactile, convenient, informative, portable and (increasingly these days) a thing of beauty.

 Admittedly, some genres have been driven to extinction by digital rivals. Those hefty dinosaurs, the general encyclopaedias, had an answer to everything except what you were looking up. And they failed to compete with Wikipediosaurus.

 But with a more focused reference work – Hall’s Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art, for example – I’ve been known to beat the nearest phone user hands down.

 Then there are the books that are just quite simply delectable. But herein lies a pitfall, because sometimes we just can’t say no.

 Recently, I was talking to my 92-year-old father about his accumulation of lavishly illustrated tomes. He admits, with some consternation, that he may never get round to reading most of them.

 His experience is akin to the guilt and frustration many of us have felt on receiving a beautifully produced, but unsolicited, book. We feel a duty to do it justice – otherwise, what a waste! But maybe we just don’t want to.

 Let’s forget for a moment that it’s a book. We live in an age of mass production. This has taken us by surprise in evolutionary terms, our instincts to cherish and revere sophisticated objects are very strong, even now that such items are plentiful.

 An author might spend 1,500 interesting hours researching and writing a publication. A few dozen readers might collectively devote the same number of hours to enjoying it.

 But mass production dramatically distorts this ‘one-to-many relationship’– one author to many thousands of readers. Millions of person-hours may be needed for all the printed copies to be read.

 JK Rowling should reflect on that responsibility as she pens her next doorstep!

 Seen in this light, my dad shouldn’t feel guilty if he hasn’t got the time or inclination for a particular book. Someone somewhere will have read it.

 The professions of printing and publishing are noble ones.

William Caxton and William Morris are among my heroes. But they put hard graft into each and every copy they published.

 William Blake was even more devoted and laborious in the production of his own hand-tinted books. And medieval monks spent many weeks creating unique copies of texts that they considered important.

 So I’ve started to see the book not as a chattel but as a cultural relationship, requiring commitment from the author, the publisher, the purveyor and the reader.

 Booksellers and libraries play a vital role in this – enabling us to find out about a book before allocating time and money to it.

 We shouldn’t feel guilty about what we don’t want to read.

But we may have reason to castigate ourselves if we have ever discovered a book in a local shop only to order it online from a lean, mean corporation that contributes little to the cultural habitat on which it depends.