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It will be awhile yet, but yeah, perhaps. Small presses will continue publishing books for some time yet, but also e-books, coming. As to the libraries, well, there's the print on demand thing: maybe the libraries will have printers in at least the central one to make books as necessary (number of copies depending on use, etc). (Although, there is the turn away from reading among many, so those games etc will take up more space.) The UofA Bookstore has one, for making 'real' books of course packages, but is also being used by a lot of writers who are self publishing in very small runs, one of the unintended consequences of the digital revolution & all that. In still desiring hold a book in my hands, I begin to feel more & more an old fart. Doug On 1-Sep-10, at 11:35 PM, Mark Weiss wrote: > I think you got it right at the start (well, not the junk mail > part). The econnomics are pretty compelling. We'll all be walking > around with kindles. It works like this: the big retailers like > amazon demand a bigger and bigger cut of print books while promoting > ebook sales, which net less for the publishers but cost almost > nothing to produce and sell for a fraction of the cost of books on > paper. So books on paper are bought only by the few who care about > the difference, and are priced higher to offset the demands of > amazon and company, which further reduces demand. At the same time > libraries increasingly turn to electronic editions of books and > journals, and google finishes digitizing every book ever made that's > no longer in copyright protection, which means that students get > used to reading on a screen--it becomes the norm. Game over. Douglas Barbour [log in to unmask] http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/ Latest books: Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy) http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664 Wednesdays' http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. Oscar Wilde