I’m not actually here to post a review of the latest book in George R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice heptalogy. I’m still reading it (though I will acknowledge that, yes, it is better than its immediate predecessor).

The publisher noted that sales of physical copies were outstripping those of digital editions. Overall, digital sales are less than 10% of the market, but often on big new bestsellers, the digital versions, which are cheaper and don’t sell out, do better in the first few days.

Not so here.

And it’s a big damn book. Big, heavy, and expensive.

Books of almost cultish value – and I include the Harry Potter series about which I have some ambivalence – seem to demand a physical presence for the diehards who make up the buyers during those first days. An object of totemic presence is required.

Will that be enough to save the physical book?