I am unreasonably old-fashioned about online purchasing. While I might not quite take the bus to Ryanair head office to buy plane tickets, I regard the business of buying on the internet with suspicion, particularly when buying books. After all, why would I want to exchange the feel, touch and lovely papery smell of books, the chat with my local bookseller and the exchange of ideas on what we've been reading for an impersonal click of my mouse on one of the growing number of online bookselling websites?

And yet, a survey conducted by Frankfurt Book Fair in 2008 revealed that online bookselling was "the most important development in bookselling in the past 60 years", and books outsell every other product sold online, according to a 2008 Neilsen survey.

Perhaps I've been missing something. Is online bookselling the way of the future, or will we traditionalists, with our love of dusty bookshops and the pleasures of the browse, have the last laugh?

Brona Looby, marketing manager at Eason, is thrilled that online book sales have been an "area of phenomenal growth, particularly this year". She estimates the surge in growth at "Well over 100 per cent -- it's an area that's growing faster in Ireland all the time as more and more people become aware".

Indeed, Eason is so excited by the surge in its online business it is planning to capitalise on it with "a major [online] marketing campaign for the second half of this year".

Other businesses such as Canadian operation ABE books, a pioneer of the "online marketplace" concept, where it facilitates the listings of hundreds of smaller booksellers and the processing of customer payments on their behalf, has seen its business mushroom in the 13 years since its inception. In the process, it has grown from showing two million books on its website in 1996 to a whopping 110 million today. So successful has ABE been that it was acquired by behemoth Amazon in December 2008.

Alan Warnock, who has been running an online business, Warnock Books, for some years, sees the growth in online book purchasing in Ireland as a direct result of the roll-out of broadband across the country, to areas not served by a local bookshop. "If you live in west Cork, and you order a book today, you'll have it on Monday morning. If you go into a bookshop in town, they may not have it, they'll have to order it and you may have to go back to get it and pay for the car parking," he says. And what's more, "because of the vast range of titles available online, retails shops cannot compete even if they have over 20,000 titles."

Warnock has put his finger on the great advantage of online book-buying: that it's speedy but, more important, that you can get your hands on out-of-print, specialist, hard-to-find titles that retail bookshops no longer stock. At the same time, second-hand and antiquarian books are a profitable area for retailers who would find it hard to compete with the heavily discounted prices offered by Amazon for many popular titles. Indeed, the antiquarian area is where bookselling first developed an online presence, as ABE press and publicity manager Richard Davies explains. When ABE co-founder Cathy Waters tried to track down books for her customers in the Dark Ages, ie 1995, she "would put an advertisement in a book listings magazine and other booksellers would write back weeks later and say they had one. It was a terrible process. So her husband who was working in IT for the government in British Columbia said: "Well, why not put the two together?" And the rest is history. "Who would have thought that old books would be the perfect match for the internet?" Davies enthuses. Indeed.

Online buying is well-suited to non-fiction, as customers can more easily search for a particular subject, say, the Battle of Stalingrad. But internet retailers have more of a battle over fiction, where "real" bookshops still offer very competitive prices. And supermarkets also discount substantially on bestselling titles, enough to tempt you to pop the latest Cathy Kelly or Patricia Scanlan into your trolley along with the cornflakes.

Looby agrees: "Within the bookshop, a large percentage of sales come obviously from the bestsellers, but people will buy health titles online and people who are desperate to get their children to sleep will buy books on childcare. That side of it is just fascinating."

So, if you have piles or a crabby baby, the internet is for you. But, more important, on the internet, the customer is king. If you don't like the service a bookseller has given you, you can say so, loud and clear, using the website facility to "rate" your bookseller. A few ratings of less than 90 per cent and they are cast into online purgatory. The internet is also a haven for those of us who have endured the scorn of a wannabe Hemingway behind the bookshop counter as we buy a job lot of true crime, or whose hearts sink when we hear the words "we can order that for you", or have been treated to some interesting exchange-rate prices.

So what's the catch? Surely it can't be all rosy -- with an increasing number of retailers competing for us spoilt customers, how do they make a living, and can they offer a comparable experience to the bookshop? Karen Golden is websales manager for the venerable Kenny's bookshop in Galway, the third generation of the family to work in the business. It has a stand-alone online business, but also lists on the marketplace websites.

"It's a funny situation as our competitors are also our colleagues -- there are hundreds of thousands of booksellers. It's almost like a co-operative in that we all create listings that bring people to the website. But if someone wants a specific book, we have to be competitive in all other regards," says Golden.

Chief in this is pricing. Kenny's, like many other online booksellers, uses price-matching software that constantly monitors and compares Kenny's prices with that of other booksellers. "There's a certain amount of auto-matic re-pricing which goes on, although there is a price below which the book is not worth selling."

Golden cheerfully admits that "it can be a race to the bottom", but counts on Kenny's name in specialist Irish-interest titles as its USP, particularly as "getting books off the island is insanely expensive... relative to what sellers in the US or UK are paying". But, as she points out, Kenny's offers a five per cent discount to customers who order directly from the website, with free shipping in Ireland.

Alan Warnock finds that the global reach of his operation is the main advantage, giving him and his 25,000 book inventory access to an international market, via the online marketplaces, that a retail operation couldn't even dream of. At the same time, though, "the world's your competitor. If you have new books, you are competing with all of the new book booksellers; if you have a second-hand or collectible book, then you are competing on that level".

But Warnock can be surprised at times: "I had a book on Robert Emmet and the 1798 rebellion, which was bought by a woman living on Lake Baikal in Siberia." And all of the booksellers point to the fact that you don't have to close your online business at the end of the day either. Orders come in 24 hours a day from all over the world.

But the most important weapon in gaining competitive advantage is Google. Large operations such as ABE use search-engine optimisers -- real people who constantly work on the ABE listings to ensure that they are Google-friendly -- as well as relying on other sources. "We write lots of content about a book, it's great if a blogger recommends ABE books, or if newspapers recommend us -- that all helps with our page rank. Search engines are absolutely crucial," says Richard Davies.

Interestingly, all of those interviewed feel that the future is bright for both kinds of bookselling: savvy retailers such as Eason can reap the rewards of having two kinds of selling businesses, as Looby explains: "We can use it [the website] to promote instore events, it's free marketing, which benefits both sides of the business, and the amount of titles that we can feature online is immense." And Kenny's has cleverly used its website, to "emulate, as far as possible, the bricks-and-mortar business", as Golden puts it, providing customers with lots of Irish- and Galway-interest content to enhance their online visit.

Even so, online booksellers simply can't replace the experience of browsing in a bookshop, having a quiet read to see if you can get past page three of a novel, examining the cover, having a little sniff of the crisp white pages. Online buying can deliver an efficient, price-conscious way of accessing a vast library but, as Alan Warnock says, "There will always be room for the bookshops because it's an experience: restaurants are never going to be put out of business by takeaways. If you want a book and you don't have time to get it, well, that's your takeaway."

And with all the goodies on offer online, perhaps I might be tempted to order in once in a while.

www.abebooks.com/warnockbooks

- Alison Walsh