Garbhan Downey has worked as a journalist, broadcaster, newspaper editor and literary editor. Currently an editor with Guildhall Press, he has published six novels and several non-fiction books. He talks us through his journey through publishing technology to releasing the first e-book from an Irish publisher:

Six months ago, my book The American Envoy was the first novel released for Kindle by an Irish publishing house (Guildhall Press) simultaneously with its paperback version. This merited a mention in the Sunday Times and, although O’Brien Press stole some of our thunder by e-publishing Niall O’Dowd’s enthralling biography An American Voice the same weekend, we considered ourselves the big dog’s nether-regions.

Still riding on this wave of techie joy, I was asked to appear on the BBC in Ireland a few weeks ago to talk about the fact that e-books were outselling hardbacks on Amazon for the first time. Another chance to tout our greatness to the world, I assumed. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Within thirty seconds, I was being slowly baked alive, by a quasi-outraged presenter and an independent bookshop owner, as the man out to destroy reading as we know it.

I understand entirely where they’re coming from. Despite the fact that I qualified in IT, I’ve never been great with change myself. I tend to resist new technology until I need it.

When I started life as a freelance journalist from my Derry home 20 years ago, I filed copy by phone, or, for longer pieces, on clunky Amstrad discs, which I then stuck on a bus along with the next day’s glossy photographs. It was a simple process and I was happy. 

You had to wait in turn to recite your copy – often for hours. They rang you back when they were ready. One freelance used to spice up his top-lines to get himself to the top of the queue and once even pre-announced the death of a certain NI politician to get his masters to return his calls.

The advent of the fax speeded things up – though you still had to verify that your work had been received, retyped by the copy-pool and then approved by an editor before you could head out for soda-pops. But despite the fact that I regularly ran out of paper and ink (not to mention patience with the local lunatics who would jam the fax with 85-page accounts of UFO’s over North Antrim), it made my life a lot easier.

The “modem”, which the Irish News installed for me in 1993, took me longer to adapt to. It had the twin associated dangers of your copy disappearing into a black hole before you sent it, or of your copy disappearing into a black hole after its arrival in Belfast because the guy at the other end pushed the wrong button. For the first three months, I continued to fax my copy up the wire, to be sure, to be sure. And to this day, I always like to have a tangible product as a receipt.

My debut book (1994) was written and edited on old Amstrads, and set using a primitive first-gen DTP package. The designers did a first class job, though I can only imagine how much easier it would be for them now.

As a BBC trainee in the mid-90s, I was taught how to use a schoolbag-sized reel-to-reel recorder and sent out to interview the greats. You lugged the machine back to the station and edited the reels using nothing but scalpels, white marking pencils and strong white sticky-tape. The great fear on the late-shift was that someone might ask you to produce a “package”, which would require three or four layers of sound. You could wind up working for 14 hours straight and filling dozens of bins with your waste tape.

Naturally, we bitched and protested when digital editing was introduced. But within a year, it was second nature to us. What started as a chore soon became a convenience and eventually a necessity. There was no going back. Today, reporters’ recorders are little bigger than your smartphone, which incidentally will do at push if your batteries fail. And you can edit quite adequately on either device too, if you’re in a hurry.

In virtually all media, the production process has become much quicker, cleaner and cheaper over the past two decades. My more recent books have all been handled, from jotted note to printed page (or e-page), on increasingly sophisticated software. Thanks to products like Acrobat Reader, editing is so much easier, and, theoretically at least, there is no need for printed manuscripts any more.

Change in the way we read books is just as inevitable. Consumers love the feel, smell and look of printed books – I know I do. But, spoiled by the advent of e-shopping, they also want unlimited choice, the ability to buy their book any hour of the day or night and to know they’re paying the best price.

Most of all, though, they don’t want to wait for their product. Whether it’s 48 hours for a book from Amazon – or three to four weeks from a US supplier. They can download their songs and films from iTunes immediately, so why should it be different with books?  They want their dolly and they want it now.

Sure, they want portability too - last year, for the first time ever, I went on holiday with 25 new books in my side pocket, courtesy of my Sony Reader. But being able to buy the follow-up to your just-finished Stieg Larsson in a remote Tuscan village at midnight? Now, that’s where e-books really come into their own.

I said earlier that I tend to resist technology until I need it – and the truth is, I’ve never needed a book so badly I’ve had to download it. Yet. But already, many times, I’ve bought e-books online because I couldn’t get hard-copy ones locally or didn’t want to wait for the post.

What started as a chore is rapidly developing into a convenience. But as I look at my 11-year-old son’s bulging schoolbag, I know one thing for certain fact - it will very soon become a necessity.