First it was the onset of television, which was supposed to sound the death knell of books and the pursuit of reading, but over time the two forms of entertainment have found a natural and easy co-existence.

And now, in a world in which it's possible to carry around the equivalent of a suburban library while on holiday, the physical book should fast be disappearing.

But it's not, and this phenomenon – the continued existence of things that technology should have killed off completely by now – will be the topic of the Ray Mathew lecture at the National Library on Thursday.

Keneally – the prolific Australian author whose most famous novel, Schindler's Ark, won the Booker prize in 1982 and was made into the Oscar-winning film Schindler's List – said he was fascinated that it was our human nature that was keeping the book alive.

"I think the physical book has survived in part because we're tactile animals and we like the feel. Everyone tells you that. It survives because we want the physicality of the contact with the book, and I wanted to look at other areas where there is no reason for things to exist," he said.

"There's no need for football stadiums any more, because we can watch the game with a computer-generated crowd and all the appropriate noises on TV … But we turn up – we're tribal. We go to the cineplex because we like to laugh and cry in a crowd. So because we're animals there are a number of things and a number of artefacts and institutions that still exist even though there's no technological need for them."

And while the e-book and the physical book were fast achieving a kind of parity in terms of general preference, and many independent bookshops were closing, the physical book-publishing industry was still the centre of the literary ecosystem.

"There's been a great weeding out and it's not the golden era of the book, but interestingly still, young computer-savvy people, if they write a book, they want to be published if possible in the old print form. They look upon that as the gateway to being published in the broadest sense, including electronically," he said.

"It's partly because the industry is structured so that you find out about a book's existence through its trade publication … but I think it's very interesting that the young, who shouldn't hanker for that physical validation of that little block of material called a book, nonetheless do."

Thomas Keneally will be presenting the Ray Mathew Lecture at the National Library of Australia on September 4. This event is booked out.