Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
Negroponte has a good point in that the areas that will jump on ebooks are those that don't have good access to printed books. It is the same point as his cellphone argument: Cellphones took off faster in places that didn't have good alternatives; in the U.S., where landlines were ubiquitous, we could afford to take our time adapting to cellphones. You might as well look at them as two completely different markets, with completely different priorities determining their adoption rate.
In those areas where printed books are rare-to-nonexistent, ebooks probably will be dominant and replace paper books in 5 years. In areas like the developed world, where print is still easily obtained, it will take longer.
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I am fairly certain that print will never really disappear. The thing with ebooks is that they are not tangible, they require a third party to host/maintain them. One good Electro Magnetic Pulse or a strong Solar event and you could lose your entire library. As an IT person I cannot say how many times I've had to inform a customer, "Sorry, but when your hard drive crashed you lost all the pictures stored in there, no way to get it back."
Some of us like paper books, simply because we can see them and know they are ours.