Interesting article however I don't think I'll ever grasp the concept that physical books could one day disappear entirely from the household.
If you take an example as puerile as my son's latest acquisition 'Where is little duck?', I struggle to see how an electronic replacement can supersede the physical interaction he has with the different textures and the constant struggle he has learning how to turn one page at a time (he's only 13 months old btw!).
I love ebook technology and whilst I can't justify the cost of a kindle currently, I could definitely see myself reading more if I had one but I think to say that technology will render physical books defunct is sensationalism.
And yet your example is squarely in the center of the problem. How many children's books from 1850 are in your house? How many children's books from 1950 are in your house? What percentage of your own children's books are still in your possession?
Children's books have a very short shelf life. New ones get published all the time. A very tiny percentage become Curious George and get reprinted for decades, but the rest go out of print. The printed copies get used by children and therefore become ragged and nasty. In ten years you will have thrown them away. Hopefully you will have thrown them away: Clutter is no good either. If we want to preserve them it should not be your house's job.
This is why archiving is hard. It is why backups are hard. It all seems so redundant when the objects are shiny and new and sitting right there, they're in the stores, they're on all your iDevices, they're all over YouTube. And then one day you wake up and the original film of your 1970s-era Oscar-winning movie has fallen apart. This actually happens! You've got to think ahead.
The danger of the digital era is that we get tempted to rely on a number of physical copies that is so small that we get blindsided by black-swan accidents. That's what this is really about. The movie Metropolis was ultimately saved because it was distributed in physical copies and a film archive in Argentina didn't throw theirs away like everybody else. That sort of thing is in danger of stopping. Make copies!
I am 100% in favour of archiving and I agree with your point entirely. My frustration is directed towards those who believe that within the next few decades, printed books will be obsolete.
I tend to agree that we have a little time, but then again these things happen quickly when they happen. If you don't prepare in advance, you end up trying to invent your archiving plan in the middle of the fire sale.
This needn't actually be that hard if we do it systematically.
I don't see that there is a significant difference between ebooks replacing paper books, and books replacing scrolls, or mp3s replacing CDs replacing vinyl.
Aficionados may still use the legacy format, preferring it due to some special advantage, but for the normal man-in-the-street, the more convenient format will definitely replace the old.
Pop-up books and textured books for small children, like the "That's not my ..." series are a different matter, and I can't picture quite what their replacement will be; but normal story books, whether illustrated or not, will easily be replaced by ebooks, once colour e-ink is good enough and cheap enough.
I don't think it will happen to you or I in our lifetimes, we already own too many books, and the effort and expense of replacing our existing paper collections with electronic copies is too great.
It will happen to other people in our lifetimes. People who are young children today are just as unlikely to buy paper books in adulthood as today's youth are to buy CDs. I wouldn't be surprised if your son's high school studies are conducted without paper books.
I can't imagine buying paper fiction for myself any more, unless I have a very good reason for doing so (I recently had to kill several hours alone on a rainy day with nothing but my wallet, so I bought one).
I think an issue is the leap involved. Vinyl required record players to be used- thus the leap to CDs is replacing mechanical players with more sophisticated mechanical ones. Books, however, require no analogous external player. eBooks, on the other hand, require readers, which are digital and subject to mechanical failures. eBook readers also have other external requirements such as a need to be charged, Wi-Fi access to download books, and so on. A paper book is self-contained.
The other thing, in terms of elementary schooling, is that it is far more cost effective to distribute paper books than eBook readers to hundreds of children. It's possible that a nigh-indestructible e-paper could work, but only if it's incredibly cheap, and the electronic formats of the books are much less expensive than traditional hard copies.
If 5 children out of a class of 30 lose a book a year, and each book costs between $5-$10, replacement costs are not substantial. If 5 children out of a class of 30 lose a kindle a year, then we're talking serious money.
If you take an example as puerile as my son's latest acquisition 'Where is little duck?', I struggle to see how an electronic replacement can supersede the physical interaction he has with the different textures and the constant struggle he has learning how to turn one page at a time (he's only 13 months old btw!).
I love ebook technology and whilst I can't justify the cost of a kindle currently, I could definitely see myself reading more if I had one but I think to say that technology will render physical books defunct is sensationalism.