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I like the way he phrased this: "It's partly that traditional books are such good technology...." Without dissing the ebook, he's making a good point. Traditional books are a very successful technology, and anything that would "replace" them is going to have to be leaps and bounds better.
I was thinking about this technology issue last night. The analogy to CDs isn't really apt-- the better analogy, I think, would be to sheet music, especially vocal sheet music. With the proper training, a human being can turn a sheet of wood pulp with marks on it into music. That's a powerful technology, and CDs have not replaced it. Ebooks might, at some point, when the readers have become much more robust, easier to use, and power-efficient. By "robust," I mean that at the very least, any physical abuse that a printed book would survive, an ebook has to survive (and preferably they should be more resistant to abuse). By ease of use, I mean it should be so obvious how to use the unit that no one needs documentation. (We don't have documentation or tech support to read paper books, unless you count the video I posted in the lounge.) Data protection, e.g. backups, should be automatic, and getting new material should be as simple as buying a book from Amazon, no matter where you are. And by power-efficient, I think I mean that if you are reading in sunlight or a well-lit room, no power is needed, and the unit can absorb enough energy from its environment when not in use that you can also power a small, extremely efficient light source when needed. (Yes, I'm dreaming. I like to dream big.)
At that point, if you can get the cost of the reader down to the equivalent of 5 hardcovers, I think people will start to prefer ebooks to the paper kind. And preference of e versions of newspapers will probably come a lot sooner, because as Marr points out, the ebook reader already has significant advantages over daily newsprint.
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