I was asked today why I thought online publishing won’t takeover traditional publishing. My answer was that humans have been reading off paper for hundreds of years, and I don’t believe that books are fungible.
Music formats–from vinyl to 8-track to cassette to CD to MP3–are much more fungible. The delivery mechanism has a history of fairly rapid change. One format has acceptably replaced another. It is foreseeable that this is an infinite process. For literature–text on stone, animal skin and papyrus to parchment to codexes and bound pages to ebooks–the cycles of change have been much longer and the adoption of new technology has been slower.
Parchment, for example, was introduced as a replacement to papyrus sometime after the 3rd century. Documented use of papyrus, however, continued in classical literature until the 7th century, and even until the late 11th century. Not exactly a quick uptake of technology.
I think until we run out of trees and the ability to use 100% post-consumer recycled products, bound pages–or books–will still be used. Etexts, audio books, and whatever digital format we create for the future will of course be acceptable and used by many people, but the historical data on the adoption of ebooks does not suggest any wide scale change in the habits of book readers.
Now newspapers are a different story. The nature, however, of a newspaper–a collection of short articles–translates well online, as do certain types of books, such as reference manuals, recipe books and perhaps even poetry and short fiction. Like the shift from papyrus to paper, change is inevitable, but I’d argue that the phase out period will likely extend well beyond my lifetime.