So during the last week or so, I've been doing some research on laptops and netbooks in an attempt to help my girlfriend to choose a machine for her own use. This led, not unnaturally, to a brief visit to the local SonyStyle store -- since I'm a big fan of the Vaio machines -- and, while she investigated the possibilities of small Vaio laptops, I poked around at the Sony ereader station set up in the store.

I have to admit, I really enjoy playing with the machines set up for demo in these stores. It's great to be able to hit buttons, get it to do interesting things, and, if it stops working, hey, you can move on to the next one. It isn't as if you own it and have to figure out why, exactly, if you hit the small round button just after the large square button, the screen goes blank and then bright green with stripes. Or whatever does happen.

So I was standing there fiddling around with the wide variety of ereaders Sony had out for demonstration and there were a couple of them that I simply couldn't make do anything. They were on, yes, and that was about it. They were displaying a single page of text -- or, in one case, a paragraph because the screen was small and the text was big -- and that was it. It wasn't as if this was all this particular model did; it was supposed to do just about everything bar sit you down, make you a cup of tea, and rub your shoulders while you read.

The odds are that these readers weren't working because someone, probably someone like me, I have to say, hit the round button after the square button and fried the works somehow and no staff member had noticed yet. But even on the readers that I could make do something -- it wasn't necessarily easy to tell what did what. It was fairly self-explanatory, yes, and, if you had any familiarity with similar electronic devices -- like an .mp3 player or, I imagine, a mobile phone -- it was easier.

But I found myself thinking while walking home that what would happen if, to posit a philosophical question for a minute, everyone prophesying the death of analog print is right. Every known book in the history of ever is going to vanish from shelves everywhere in the next year and everyone's going to have to get an ereader or similar device. What would happen to those people who don't mess with mobile phones or .mp3 players or computers on a regular basis and aren't, therefore, familiar with the quirks of electronic equipment that the rest of us put up with on a daily basis? It doesn't look like being a friendly kind of learning curve.

And this is all very obviously "worst case scenario"-type thinking, obviously. But it can be handy to have in mind what the worst case looks like -- then you know what you're aiming to avoid.