Chambers Harrap, the publisher of dictionaries that Robert McCrum describes as "setting the gold standard", has confirmed it is to close its main office in Edinburgh. A decline in sales due to the rise of the internet has been blamed. Why would people pay for such knowledge when it's available online for free, or bundled with any decent word processing package? Well, here's why – and also why many may yet come to regret the demise of the paper product, if demise this is.

I should declare an interest. I'm the editor of a Chambers dictionary myself. But the reason for my concern is neither nostalgia for the leather-bound past, nor disdain for the virtual future. Rather, it stems from the experience of watching publishers agonise over the look and feel of their books. Why, I asked, do they design new fonts, discuss paper quality, and compare paginations at such length? It's not only to produce a product that will entice book lovers to make a purchase. It's because, I came to realise, the look, feel and layout of a book plays a massive role in conveying its content. A badly designed dictionary is as poor a dictionary as one with errors or missing words.

Imagine you are searching for a word. It's on the tip of your tongue, but you can't quite find it. So you pick up the well-thumbed tome beside you. It is a superb browsing device. You glance through its pages, and all sorts of possibilities capture your eye as your brain draws associations from the flicker. There's not just the pleasure of the search. One word sparks remembrance of another, or leads to the discovery of one that is new – for use now or in the future. As a result, you may well find a better way of articulating your thoughts, so that you don't just mean what you say but say what you mean – which, as the March Hare pointed out to Alice, is 'Not the same thing a bit!'. The very bulk of the book somehow contributes to the effort.

Compare the richness of that experience with a spell check facility. An empty box on the screen stares vacantly back at you. The cursor blinks lazily. It offers no help at all. It conveys nothing of the world of words that, with a dictionary, you can hold in your hands. That books do so much is why a library can be called a place of learning in a way that a data warehouse cannot.

There's more. We humans are embodied creatures. As philosophers put it, we are extended in space and time. That's no humdrum observation. Our intelligence depends upon it, for we feel our way through the world. Moreover, the same embodiment is intimately linked to our capacity for imagination which, in turn, has much to do with the growth of knowledge. The material world we inhabit nurtures our ability to think, as some of the synonyms used for intelligence themselves suggest: we say, "she's bright", "he's sharp", "they're quick" – metaphors all derived from the physical world.

This embodiment, the midwife of the imagination, is something computers just don't have. It's arguably why they fail to achieve even a passable artificial intelligence, for all the efforts of programmers. Computers proceed by gathering facts, along with the links between those facts, and then run them through algorithms to try to make sense of the world – or more often than not, to fail to make sense of the world, as they get lost in an infinite tangle.

So the deeper reason why dictionaries are such successful knowledge tools is that they are embodied too. They occupy the same extended world as we do. You literally know where you are in a book. It's why the publishers of books can aspire to make them feel friendly, whereas the designer of a computer interface can only hope to minimise the user's alienation from the silicon microcosm inside the plastic casing.

Technological innovations are undoubtedly testing dictionary publishers, and book publishers more generally. But as books are so much more than just a medium for carrying knowledge, so we should care that they are under threat – and care again, if we think of the wired generations ahead of us who will also need that knowledge.