[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Publishing, like the music industry, will have to alter itself to deal with a new proportion of digital to printed product, increasingly more digital and less printed as time advances. Publishing will eventually become a primarily digital industry, and printed matter will be an incidental that will probably not net publishers much compared to the digital products.

Bookstores will allow people to browse books, but said browsing will more likely be onscreen, either on store displays or demos beamed to your own device... in other words, no more big stores with shelves and shelves of paper books sitting around (not even demos... that will prove to be too big a cost for too little a return in the future). Most users will then download the e-book format (most likely a universal format that their personal device can instantly translate to their format, and maybe even language, of choice). E-books will be the cheapest form of book available, bar none, and the dominant format for literature worldwide.

Bookstores will either add POD to their stores, or form alliances with POD-specializing printers. There will be some ready-made printed books in stores, for sale not demo, at the highest premium price, for those who want printing and can't wait for a POD printing of their own. POD while-you-wait will provide 2 qualities of books, one very simple and simply bound (glue-tape, spiral, etc), and one more finished like the on-shelf books, for gifting and print-preference use. Simple-bound printing will cost more than e-books... fancy printing will cost more than that... ready-made will be the most expensive yet. Many people will never touch a printed book in their lives, yet will have access to libraries of material.

Literature will be more in competition with magazines, which offer more varied content, in more bite-sized forms, and are capable of being reshuffled according to taste. Presently, magazines are like scrapbooks filled with short and medium-sized articles and bits devoted to a particular subject. Individuals will embrace e-versions of these magazines, and create scrapbooks of their own from multiple magazines, further refining the scrapbook concept to a personal level.

I expect the scrapbook to be the dominant format of personal information storage, where people will keep literature, pictures, articles, videos, music, etc, arranged by subjects and available at a moment's notice... such a storehouse of personal information device may never leave a person's hands/pocket/purse/whatever.