The Future of Books
Fiction Matters sums up my suspicions about the future of tree books after ebooks become the norm. Tree books will remain, but they will be expensive, high quality objects d'art, mainly for collectors and book lovers. The analogy is to records.
Comments
Trees are also not the only source of paper. I think we'll start seeing hemp paper soon, which is a renewable resource.
If you look through the history of predictions about the future, you see that most predictions are wrong. I think, especially since ebooks only represent ~2% of actual book sales and publishers are not invested in raising that figure (mostly because Amazon is lowballing the retail price because their interest right now is in selling Kindles more than it is in selling books for Kindles), paper books will be around for some time.
Or it could go in a completely different direction. (As Scott says, predictions are notorious). POD could become a home or coffeshop technology, and anyone who downloads a book could decide to make their own print copy.
If the dispute over Kindle speech reading is any indication, this will cause a lot of headaches in copyright matters.
Ebooks are great for convenience, but they lack the soul of a traditional book. No feel of paper, no smell of paper, just an impersonal electronic dodad.
I don't see real books becoming more scarce, per se. Perhaps ebooks can be good for authors--especially if people buy the same book in two formats: regular book and ebook. :D