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I expect the article isn't that far off: I also expect that a lot of people who have been churning out books to self-publish will reach a point where they see no or tiny return for their effort, and will decide it's not worth it. The flood of self-published books will wane. But I don't expect it to dry up completely.
There will still be self-publishers who will exhibit patience and keep pushing, however energetically, to keep their books out there and earning something. They will improve in their writing and write some more. There will always be new books written and self-published, just as there were before the web came along.
The question for the future, therefore, becomes, how will the traditional and self-publishing worlds co-exist, and how will the public interact with them? We have the potential for the public to decide that self-published books are equal in quality to traditionally-published books, and make greater efforts to seek them out (and separate the wheat from the chaff). We have the potential for the traditional publishers to "go to war" against self-publishers, using more overt negative campaigns and even sabotage to pollute the self-published market. We have the potential for the public to decide that neither is acceptable, and have book-reading fall into an almost-exclusively backlist market.
I see the result of these questions to be greater than the concern about the self-publishing bubble. They will determine the future of all books and writing.
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