Quote:
Originally Posted by JayCeeEll
It may still take 10-15 years to die, but when these children leave school and start work they will strongly resist any reading material that is not electronic.
Ten years after they enter the workforce there will be almost nothing produced on paper.
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... in first-world countries, perhaps. Paper has survived several thousand years because it's available across a wide range of technological skills; it's not going to be replaced by battery-op devices. Not even ones with really cheap, really powerful batteries.
Horses are still very good transportation in some parts of the world. In some parts of the US, even. Paper books aren't going to vanish, any more than horses have, even if they're replaced as the most common urban method of information storage & retrieval.
I'm all for more ebooks, more devices, and expect the collapse of the Big 6 publishing industry in the next couple of decades, and maybe sooner. But that doesn't mean I think pbooks will vanish--instead, they'll become a multi-niche market device.
Children's books will remain a solid market (three-year-olds are never going to deal with screens the way they do pages, and we don't have a digital version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar); reference books will still be useful on paper (we're quite a ways off from the ability to effectively flag an ebook in six places with movable post-it notes); coffee-table art books will still trump digital anything for their fans. And there'll still be plenty of demand for other books--pocket-size novelty books, crossword puzzles, baby's-first-year scrapbooks, recipe books with space for notes in the margins.