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Yeah, this has been predicted before. He's wrong.
1. Streaming is too unreliable for reading. People read in all kinds of places with no service, including on airplanes.
2. The value of streaming for e-books isn't there the way it is for music. If you want to listen to 8 hours of new music, you would need to buy 160 songs (assuming 3 minutes per song). At $1 per song, that is $160 to buy...so some sort of flat-fee subscription service might make sense.
If you want to read for 8 hours, you probably need one book (on average). At $13 for a new big 6 book, there may be some value in a subscription...but it will be less than the value music would provide, simply because the cost is less to begin with.
3. Free books in exchange for advertising won't work for tradpub books. It may work for 99c books...although people may still be resistant to ads for books, even cheap books.
It is easy to imagine a way to monetize books other than simply selling them. It is quite different to have the customers go along with it, however. It's also hard to make a lot of money on with ads - broadcast TV does it, but they are able to provide advertisers with tens of millions of viewers *in one hour*. Only the most elite authors have sold more than ten million books - and most of them took more than an hour to do so.
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