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For many years publishers have exersized the ability to decide for the public what they will read and what ideas they will not be allowed to come across. I for one and not confortable with a very rich man in an air conditioned office somewhere in New York City deciding at the drop of a pen what I will be allowed to read and what I won't. Expecially when that drop of a pen comes with a concerted effort on the part of that weathy man to force me to pay more of my hard earned dollars. Publishers still retain the ability to control a good percentage of what we can read in the electronic age and what we can not. However the emergence of electronic books means that these gready weathy men can not force their customers to read what they think they should read and to increase your book bill.
Publishers will not go out of business but they will be forced to live with a new reality where they simply can not control their customers. They can no longer say that "I feel you are not paying enough for your reading materiel." Some of that authority is shifting back to where it rightly should belong, with the authors. Again weathy publishers will not be out of business, instead they will be required to live in a new reality where they simply can not cotnrol their customers.
Also with every technological advancement there will always be a certain percentage of the population who is not comfortable with the new reality and instead years for a regressive society of yesturday. It happens with every technological advance and it happened many times before:
With the introduction of the cell phone and smart phone there was a certain percentage of the population who proudly installed car phones or simply exclaimed that they would alwasy rely on land line phones. These were people who were not confortable with the idea that you could carry a phone with you and would instead perferr to have older technology. That land line technology also had its own exceptance problems (although many years before hand when, my gand mother told me what her grand mother said about when phone shed their cranks) or when the phones allowed for direct dialing of anyone rather than via an operator. My grand mother talked about the exceptance problems with each, some people in her grand mother's days used to attach cranks to their phones so as to use older technology. She also taked about how people would purposely call an operator any time they picked up the phone. People were being dragged into a new phone era kicking and screaming and cell phone and smart phones were no different.
I can also recall the emergence of the personal computer (now I am dating myself) people that I knew were not confortable with the idea that there could be a computer in your home. They very idea that this thing is a computer frightened them.
The emergence of the internet into the home also stirred a lot of problems. People that I knew did not like the idea that you could get a web site from half way around the world on your computer at home, not to mention they were still getting used to the idea that there is a PC at home.
My point is that in every era there is a certain amount of the population that are not comfortable with the new technological advancements and get dragged into the new era kicking and screaming. They all will eventually learn to live with the new technology and eventually come to embrace it as they have done it in the past. The whole fact that electronic books are facing this sort of resistance is evidence that the technology is starting to get into the mainstream and starting to be excepted as standard technology.
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