"Why eBooks won’t rule the Earth"

Why eBooks won’t rule the Earth, article.
The article starts out sounding like paperbooks will still be big business generations ahead...


“E-book revenue outstrips hardbacks in first quarter,” trembled The Bookseller.
But if these stories led to you to believe that the march from paper book to eBook for all books is inevitable, you’d be just as wrong as those who assumed the introduction of airplanes would mean we’d all now be piloting flying cars.

(I don't quite follow the logic of that. Flying cars are much more expensive to make than regular cars. Ebooks are cheaper to make than paperbooks. Surely a differentiating point.) But then he pretty much ends with...


For a while, graphic novels and art books will still be superior on paper, but that’s a transitory resolution advantage fast fading.
At some point, most paper books will effectively be coffee table books, primarily for display. For many readers, it’ll be the evolution from book as content into book as object.

Exactly. I think paperbooks will be like vinyl records are now: perhaps a sound industry, but a much, much smaller industry than it was, and only selling to a specialized market (I think for vinyl the market is DJs and hardcore hifi-philes). Not many songs, percentage-wise, are put out on vinyl these days. 

In other words, it will be a distinct niche market. And think about, once ebooks are the major market, which they already are becoming close to in the US, then an ebook will be the default format, and publishing on paper will be regarded as a big extra step, and importantly an expensive and risky step. Printing a book in offset is a big and expensive process. (Print-on-demand is a different story.) 

 And so a publisher has to be pretty sure that the book either will be a solid hit (say, the Steve Jobs bio coming just after he died), or will appeal to special paperbook collectors who love "display books" made with spectacular design and on expensive paper and so on, and who are willing to pay a premium for such objects d'art.

And that's a pretty small percentage, surely rather less than five percent, maybe just one percent eventually, though that will probably take a couple of decades. 

By the way, his point: 

Setting aside the reality that paper will live on as a continued cheap, portable and disposable book medium outside of the first world...

I think he has that upside down. The third world (which is now parts of countries rather than whole countries) lacks good infrastructure. So I think that just like it has gone with mobile phones over landlines, ebooks will leap-frog paperbooks in those areas. It is way faster and cheaper to get one Kindle to Bugfug, Nigeria and then buy ebooks, than it is to find and buy and ship, say, one hundred different paper books.