Not really!
As I write a piece on how authors, literary agents, publishers, and booksellers need to change their business strategies to adapt to the advent of ebooks,I am not going to spend much time arguing that ebooks will displace paper ones because the displacement seems not just inevitable to me, but immediate, as well.
But then according to a review of Amazon’s latest Kindle in the New York Times, the article’s author, NYT technology columnist David Pogue, loves the new version, but nonetheless concludes that paper books are going to be fine:
“The point everyone is missing is that in Technoland, nothing ever replaces anything. E-book readers won’t replace books. The iPhone won’t replace e-book readers. Everything just splinters. They will all thrive, serving their respective audiences”. … the only thing keeping paper books going as a mass market today is inertia.
But as older generations die out and younger ones come online, and . as generations in the middle try ebooks and realize their advantages, the demise of paper books will continue to accelerate.
That’s an important point: the marginalization of paper books won’t continue at its current rate.
It’ll pick up speed until it hits a tipping point, and then — poof! — the only paper books published will be coffee table books and other niche forms that serve a unique (and relatively small) market.