At Secondary School stayed faithful, working my way erratically through the Penguin Classics. I felt I could trust particular publishers. They were at the creative end of a community to which I belonged.

Now, when I want a book on a programming language or an internet technology, I turn to O'Reilly. Now you send me newsletters. Now I trust you.

Except ... now the publishers do not trust me. I'm an author myself. I like receiving my royalty cheques. I understand that intellectual property is important. But buying ebooks makes me feel like a suspected felon.

Before I could download my first ebook my reader had to go through an "authorisation process". No bookshop owner had ever required me to prove I had anyone's authority to buy a book before. The book I was sold cannot be printed out to read in the bath, or lent to a friend or even downloaded onto a portable device now it has been written onto my desktop's hard-drive. It is like an medieval chained library. I do not own anything, I simply have a licence to read the material provided I sit still in front of one screen.

I feel stupid. Of course publishers were not my friends. That Puffin Club badge was a martketing ploy. My sense of community was in fact brand loyalty. I had thought the chubby cartoon Puffin was delighted when I lent my friend a C S Lewis. There I was; evangelising, whilst he was secretly gnawing at his webbed feet wondering how he could put an end to my dilution of his copyright.

In the new world children get letters before action for having build Harry Potter fan sites and Russian programmers are kept from their children.

If the publishers had not stopped trusting me, I would still have trust in them. Its like finding out that your lover is scheming and jealous. Its better to know - but weren't you happier when you didn't?