What does the future look like to you? Flying cars? Lots of neoprene? Intelligent home assistants that do everything for you and that, maybe, you’ll fall in love with, like Ryan Gosling in Blade Runner 2049?

When I ruminate on the future I always think about what we’re going to be eating. In every dystopian movie there’s always a scene of our hero or heroine taking a little dehydrated square of mush and stick it in a rehydrator – which looks suspiciously like a microwave – to turn it into a full meal. The food is usually a milky blue, or milky green. Everything looks miserable and unappetising.

Which is the much the same thing I would say about the reports that in the future we’re all going to be reading teeny tiny books. These books will be printed horizontally and held in the crook of your hand, using super-fine paper about the thickness of newspaper, allowing for pages to be flipped using just your thumb. (Imagine the kind of thin, but durable paper used to print Bibles.) The idea is that you can read the book with ease with only one hand, while standing up on a train on your morning commute, for example.

Each book will be about the size of a small smartphone, and will be able to fit into a shirt or jean pocket. But fear not, the font size is the same as a regular book, which means no squinting.

This clever Dutch invention will transform the way you read forever