SAN JOSE, Calif. — Sandy Harris has long enjoyed laid-back conversations about literature with the other members of her book club. Lately, though, technology is complicating the routine: “We’re definitely divided into the Kindle people and the not-Kindle people,” Harris says, alluding to Amazon’s popular digital reading device.

Welcome to the changing landscape of book clubs, those ubiquitous living-room forums where dog-eared tomes often now share space with Kindles, Nooks, iPads, iPhones and other portable devices.

Resentments simmer. Protocols are upended — and last December, Harris, a high school special-education teacher, wondered whether her group’s annual Christmas book swap was endangered, with so many members downloading e-books rather than buying old-fashioned hardbacks and paperbacks.

The numbers of digital converts — like Harris, a Kindle user — keep multiplying in book clubs. Those who own the devices can digitally write comments about specific passages, save the locations and jump straight to them during discussions. There’s no need to carry bulky printed books while traveling, and precious shelf space is preserved at home.

Who needs a gadget?

Yet, for many, there’s still something to be said for holding a book, savoring its yellowed pages, flipping ahead to see where the next chapter ends. And who needs a gadget, anyway, when passages can be marked by pencil or highlighter, and footnotes marked with a Post-it?

Sometimes, a cultural divide pits old-school purists against the vanguard: “What is it that disgusts me?” ponders Santa Cruz, Calif., book club member Mary Offermann, an artist who treasures “the heft, the feel, the visual pleasure of a well-designed book.

“Well, ‘disgust’ might be too strong a word, but it is close,” she says, describing the “avidity with which, when we’re ready to discuss what book to read at our next meeting, my friends jump to their Kindles. It’s as though the other people aren’t even in the room.”

Digital advantage

E-readers allow users to sprint online to the e-book catalog and instantly download a title at a fraction of the typical hardback’s cost — and even for less than many paperbacks. Busy members can read them almost anywhere, any time.

Book club member Lauren Angelo reads an e-book on her iPhone while standing in line at the grocery store. Waiting for a friend at the gym, she reads it some more. And unlike some of her friends, tethered to less tote-able “physical books,” Angelo will finish on time. “Reading on all my devices,” book club deadlines are never a problem, says Angelo.

Angelo, whose club is a subgroup of the Parents’ Club of Palo Alto and Menlo Park, notes that, while she and other members read digitally, no one is “hidden behind electronic devices” at meetings. In fact, most members, even those owning e-readers, bring plain old books to their discussions, and Angelo enjoys perusing the supplemental materials often left out of digital versions: author interviews, discussion questions, critics’ quotes. “We transcend the medium,” she says. “When you boil a book down to its essence, it’s about the writing. It’s not about the physical package.”