My guess for the near future is...
• Paper sales will continue to decline, though they won't completely fall away.
• Physical bookstores will continue to decline, though they won't disappear to the same extent as music stores.
• People will continue to kvetch about pricing on web forums, unless ebooks are slashed to $2.99 each.
• Big publishers will stick around, but will continue to focus more on big hits, and weed out the mid-range authors -- many of whom are a better fit for smaller publishers anyway.
By the way, many publishers in the US
have started to adapt to the new environment, they just aren't doing what you want them to do. Agency pricing and limiting library ebook loaning, for example, are actually better suited to the digital age than the warehouse or "use it 'til the cover falls off" models.
Australia is complicated because someone decided to use taxes, tariffs and regulations to clamp down on foreign competition; this results in both more jobs and higher prices for locals. I'm fairly confident that if your government got rid of those protectionist policies and allowed freer international imports, your prices would fall -- but in turn you'd all be complaining about foreign competition, job losses in the manufacturing sector, and the horrors of expansions of jobs in the service sector, just like Americans have for the past ~15 years. So... pick your poison.