“I’m glad you’re so confident,” a colleague said when he heard I was going to argue the case for print in front of the University of St Andrews debating society. In previous talks to young people I had found few who read newspapers. Amazon announced in July that it was now selling more e-books than hardcovers. So my mission did seem hopeless.

It helped that our motion, “Print media is dead” (it should have been “are dead”, of course), was overstated. Print clearly isn’t dead. On my train to Scotland, as many people were lost in newspapers and books as in laptops and iPads.

But the motion was not supposed to be read literally. The implied meaning was: print will be dead as soon as we students have taken over from you oldies.