[MerLock]

I think it's just the sign of the times. Technology has been and will continue to change the way we shop. It's about the convenience. In my opinion, the book industry has to change the way they do business like the way the music industry has done and the movie industry is doing. Even for physical books, I think maintaining a brick and mortar store is going to be too expensive giving the number of sales that is going to come in. Physical books will be kept alive by online stores that can ship them to you for those that still prefer printed media.

When the music/movie industry started going digital, there was a lot of fear that artists would no longer produce songs since they feared that there wouldn't be enough money in sales to compensate them for what they do. Same for movies. However, music is still around and so are movies. I think some people are just afraid of change when they are comfortable with the structure they currently have and know what to expect.

The strong points of ebooks will be in selling older perhaps out of print books. In my opinion, publishers/authors will gain a lot of addidtional revenue from selling older books that they probably don't see in traditional bookstores. Traditional bookstores don't usually carry a lot of older books due to limited shelf space. A lot of books old titles are out of print because it's not cost effective to continue to print books that don't sell many copies. However, this isn't true for ebooks so sales of older books may increase with those seeking older titles combined with those who decide to repurchase ebooks copies of there current physical books. I see someone buying a new book and enjoying it enough to do a search at the ebook store for the rest of the authors titles. They can then easily order some of the out of print or hard to find titles by that same author.