In the run-up to Christmas, Amazon's ad campaign showed beaming customers extolling the virtues of their Kindles ("It feels just like a book" – Ross). It will be a test of the retailer's scruples to see whether its next advert features Linda Grant's words: "I crave the small, tactile simplicity of my new Kindle Paperwhite..."

I've plucked the quotation from the writer's new Kindle Single, I Murdered My Library. It's totally out of context, because she adds: "...but whose screen's digital imprint is flattened of all memory and association. It's soulless and almost weightless." The clashing ideas are typical of her essay, an elegiac account of how she culled half her books when she moved house.

Grant elegantly sums up the ambivalent relationship many book lovers – I include myself – have with e-readers. An early adopter, she was devoted to her electronic bookshelf until her Kindle broke down on an aeroplane and she was stuck with the British Airways magazine.

Her rational, modernist side ("What matters is not paper or the cover or the binding or the smell of the ink, but the words") battles with her sentimental attachment to a library she started building more than 50 years ago.

Although she no longer feels the need to impress visitors with the depth of her reading, she enjoys surveying the physical evidence of her own intellectual history.

Grant gets most pleasure from returning to books – she describes a library as "a full larder for the soul". While clearing out her flat, she journeys back to 30s Paris by spotting a much-loved Jean Rhys book and dipping into it. Even if Rhys's novels were available as ebooks – Grant rightly observes that "very little literature has been digitised" – you can't really do that with an e-reader, can you?