The general impression of many appears to be that the publishing industry is on the brink of changing completely. It is certainly true that we are seeing major shifts already – be it the Amazon Kindle that has given digital publishing a jump-start, or the Apple iPad that not only offers its own app, iBooks, but has also seen an increasing interest from magazines and newspapers, most recently the integration of the Guardian’s daily edition into Newsstand. Digital, it seems, is everywhere and digital is now. Yet none of the changes we are seeing today are radically new ideas or even technologies, but rather the (preliminary) end point of an evolution that has been taking place for four decades, started by the late Michael S. Hart who, in 1971, created the very first e-book, the US Declaration of Independence, which he typed himself into the University of Illinois’s mainframe, and subsequently founded the Project Gutenberg, which, to the delight of many Kindle owners, offers e-book versions of out-of-date books for free.

After forty years, we are still very much at the beginning of ebooks. The Kindle, now available in various different incarnations ranging from the traditional with keyboard to touchscreen to tablet (the latter of which is expected to be sold at a loss in order to make the device more attractive to the consumer and bind them to the platform), was launched less than four years ago – and reportedly sold out within five and a half hours. The other big player in the e-book reader market, Barnes & Noble’s nook, was launched only two years ago, while Apple’s tablet is a mere eighteen months old.

With all this sudden innovation the question that you might ask yourself is where it’s all headed. Considering that five years ago we didn’t have any of the three devices that now dominate the market, it seems foolish to make predictions and yet certain trends are starting to appear. While the traditional reading experience is dominant on the Kindle and the nook, on the iPad a different genre is starting to appear, that offers a more interactive experience. London-based Nosy Crow is one such example: they not only publish children’s books in the traditional form, but also and apps which add another dimension to the story and lets the children engage with it. Another example which Wired has hailed as “a game-changing e-book app” is Moonbot Studios’ The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, which is as much a short animated movie as it is a book. If you have not checked this one out yet and you own an iPad, I highly recommend it.

The definition of what constitutes a book is blurring – yet another industry has taught us that the arrival of one form doesn’t necessarily mean the end of another: the music industry. Despite ubiquitous services such as Spotify or last.fm and, predominantly, iTunes, and their respective digital formats MP3 and MP4, the physical form still survives. We may now own or subscribe to most of our music as digital files, but artists are still publishing LPs. They are not part of the mainstream market anymore, but they have become collectors’ items. And if that teaches us anything, it’s that in a few years time we’ll probably be reading most of our books on e-readers or interacting with stories on our tablets; and we’ll have a few select books that we adore – and have maybe managed to get an author’s signature in – in the physical form we still buy today. Either way, there is no doubt that the book is, in one form or another, here to stay.

Really then, the question we need to ask ourselves isn’t where books are headed, the question is whether there will still be any bookshops five years from now – and the final, global collapse of Borders last month is certainly not a good sign.

Here’s a good way to get a debate about nationality going: do the Citizenship Test posted on the Guardian website, and see how many you get right. Then try and convince all your friends that, although you didn’t get the full score, you’re still British. And there is no reason to assume that you’re not. You’ve probably listened to Terry Wogan at some point, you know who James Corden is (and probably don’t like him), you can name all eleven Doctors and his companions in chronological order, and you probably admire Professor Brian Cox and Sir Richard Attenborough. You know that Boots calls itself a pharmacy but really they’re a shop that happens to also sell prescription medicines, and you know how to play the system and get free tickets on Orange Wednesdays. You moan about Royal Mail and the weather, you love the NHS and you spend too many hours a week on iPlayer. You hate Nick Clegg and you make fun of the respective other countries within the UK. You’re British.

Yet you’ve probably failed the test, and try to argue that it’s not a valid way to decide if people can become British or not. There are a few things the Guardian test doesn’t tell you:
1) The test can be done in either English, Welsh or Scottish Gaelic;
2) It differs depending on what country you live in (so if you do it in Wales, you are required to know details, e.g., about the Welsh Assembly but not about the Scottish Parliament).

But why should you know when women got the right to vote or how many Muslims live in the UK? They are pieces of trivia. And just because a foreigner studies those answers for a test doesn’t make them British. Here’s the thing: if you grow up in Britain, you understand it intrinsically. Nobody would have to tell you about the Blue Books of 1847 in Wales, because, of course, you know your own culture. You don’t have to know how many young people there are or how many Pakistanis – you have an unconscious awareness of what your society is like and how it interacts with these foreign cultures. Maybe an outsider comes to understand it as well as you do – I’d like to think I know the Welsh quite well after all these years. But an outsider still has to prove that s/he does, and the only way that can be done is by testing them on theoretical knowledge – pieces of trivia. Not all of them are irrelevant; 14 out of the 24 mentioned above should be common knowledge. That’s not enough to pass the test, but they are the most vital to understanding the country politically, socially and culturally.
It is also about demonstrating a passion about the country. Anybody could live in the UK for years and never really care about it (I did that for over twenty years in the country I was born in). However, I want to know all these things about the country I have chosen to make my home. If you are not ready to feel that passionate about the country’s history – its “pieces of trivia” – then you may as well not do the test at all. After all, nobody is stopping you from staying in the country while keeping your own nationality, as long as you are an EU citizen or have the necessary visa documents.

What may seem weird to you as essential knowledge about your country really is just a mix of essential, common knowledge, and the proof that you care enough about being naturalised that you can sit down with a book for a few days and learn as much about your new home as you possibly can. Otherwise, why bother making it your home and your new national identity?