Thank you J. K. Rowling. The British writer reminded us recently that "ebooks are here and here to stay." She's right. They are here to stay.

She also said ebooks are "miraculous for travel and for children in particular." She's half right there. Ebooks are great for travelling print addicts. I took a Kindle loaded with a bunch of new books on vacation last month and read six of them. Because our oceanside cottage in the Bay of Fundy had WiFi, I bought two more books and also downloaded the Kindle versions of the Globe, National Post and New York Times every day.

But her remark about "children in particular" is patronizing. eBooks may be great for kids, but they're absolutely perfect for adults because they make it easy to finally catch up on all the literary classics we tried to read as teenagers during that awkward, introverted, stay-in-the-bedroom-on-Saturday-night phase of our lives.

The Delphi Classics series, for example, available for $2.99 each on the Kindle, presents the complete work of forty writers whose work has passed into the public domain. Do you want to read, or re-read, Dickens, Lawrence, Woolf, Conrad and Dostoevsky? For less than $150, you can build a personal digital library of more than a thousand novels, short stories, poems and essays by some of the greatest writers in Western civilization.

Now it's true I could get these books, two or three or four a time, from the library. But then I'd feel pressured to read them in three weeks. They would sit in a pile on the coffee table glaring at me. Or I could spend $5,000 at a used book site like abebooks.com and collect hardcover versions for the non-existing bookshelves of my non-existing home library. I live in a small house with no room for books. Or I could buy the classics in cheap paperback versions and given them away after reading them.

I could do any of these things. But I won't, because I've been seduced by the convenience of the digital book, by that fact that I can carry the Kindle everywhere I go, including to and from work, and have any one of those one thousand novels and short stories at my fingertips. It is my library now, and as the owner I am Chief Librarian.

But reading the classics on a digital reader is about more than convenience. Reading a digital book is different than reading a physical book; it's more intimate, paradoxically, just as listening to music through headphones can be more intimate than listening through loudspeakers.

Digital music stored on the latest state-of-the-art iPod delivers the same sound waves to your ears that a vinyl LP or CD delivers.  A digital book is much more radical; it delivers words to your eyes, but those words look quite different from the words in a printed book. For one thing, there are far fewer of them. I'm 59 and wear bifocals, so when I crank up the font size on the Kindle I'm seeing only 19 short lines of text on each screen, roughly 120 words. That's a third the number of words on the printed page.

Because I see fewer words, and the words are easier to read, I don't skip as much. I slow down and read every word, enjoying the intricate, winding sentences of the great 19th century novelists on the perfectly flat and even screen of the Kindle. I can even crank up the font size so that I don't need glasses to read. What liberation! The screens of text fly by with the press of the button and I feel as though I'm completely immersed in a single, long river of text.

Technology often crowds our consciousness at the periphery. We're doing one thing, and a gadget by our side or in our pocket buzzes and beeps in an attempt, usually successful, to get our attention. The digital book focuses your attention on the text by eliminating all the distractions of the physical object's size, weight, and rigid format. With the digital book you control the screen, and by controlling the screen, control the quality of the reading experience.

Ebooks are often hyped as the delivery tool of choice for genre fiction readers who can't wait to download the latest product by their favourite writers. It's true that a James Patterson thriller is perfectly suited to the digital world because you can consume it in a sitting or two and then happily press Delete once you're finished.

But the classics demand to be reread. Literary world, please note that digital books have long lives and can be reread an infinite number of times and never fall apart or get lost. They never show up on the remainder table. They are cheap, which means we buy a lot of them. The ebook is in fact a liberator, as well as a library-maker. D. H. Lawrence, the great anti-technologist, might be skeptical, but the blind Joyce would appreciate the resizable fonts and I like think Dickens would be delighted to know that readers of the 21st century can carry every word of his fifteen novels in an eight-ounce rectangle of metal and plastic. Even if he doesn't know what plastic is.