Independent brick bookstores are going to look a lot like what's described here: some new books, but mostly used. Run on a very-slightly-profitable basis, in the cheapest commercial rental space available. One proprietor, who does most of the work, and occasional after-school or summer help. All the inventory will be on the web, thanks to a phone app that turns a picture of a book's cover into a full catalog listing. Prices will be depressed to rock-bottom, and some variant of the EBay "1 cent plus shipping" scheme will be the rule for anything not currently in demand.
In twenty years, your average $50 ebook reader will have a 300 dpi full-color full-motion transflective screen, readable in sunlight or with a backlight. Most of the weight will be battery. It will have a tiny CPU and a relatively studly GPU, a small amount of permanent storage (less than a terabyte) and a short distance wireless network link, which will feed your headphones if you want sound, or connect to your phone or your house networks.
There will be a secondary screen on the back which displays the book's cover. You will have the option of changing that to anything else you want to display.
Many people will not bother to buy them, because they already carry a phone that can do all that, just with a smaller screen.
I find this very sad. I do nearly all of my reading with dead tree books (I simply don't find e-readers nearly as satisfying), and if I want a book the first place I check is the used bookstore up the road. I tend to accumulate books faster than I have time to read them, and by the end of my first semester at college I had filled the woefully tiny (1 meter square) bookcase I brought with me and begun to overflow onto the windowsill and my desk.
Surely there are other people who are the same way?
I'm the same way. It began when I was an undergraduate: the sight of crowded bookshelves in a professor's office – one actually sagging under its load – flipped the crazy switch in my brain. After I got my first real job, the project of accumulation began. Having a large home library is not without its problems, but it's also a real source of joy. My only regret is not taking the time to learn some basic carpentry skills.
I would hate to do serious research in a world of ebooks – and any sufficiently serious reader becomes a researcher – but for general use, they probably are a good technology for most readers. Defenders of the paper book need to remember that mass reading of paper books is a historically recent phenomenon, for some values of "recent".
Whereas my brain boggles at how big a pain it must have been to do a literature review pre-JSTOR/Web of Science/pdfs in general.
I am a voracious reader (generally 2-5 novels/equivalent per week, depending) and love ebooks. Carry 5 long novels, 3 YA series, 4 non-fiction books, my work literature, and an assortment of my favorite comfort/pickmeup novels/short stories/essays with me constantly and instantly searchable? Yes please.
I suspect that part of the secret to that one is called Librarians.
Well, that and it's likely that when doing a literature review is hard and time consuming, people aren't quite as concerned about it's completeness as well it's easy and quick.
Yes, I am this way as well, but I think of it as a kind of allowance of irrationality that I have to make up for in other ways. I love dead-tree books, but eBooks are better in pretty much every way. The bright side is that there are plenty of used books that will continue circulating through stores and private collections for many many years, and they'll be cheap.
I can't write all over the pages of an ebook the way I can a print book. That, unfortunately, makes them almost completely useless to me and many others.
...yet. Decent digitisation / handwriting recognition should take care of that, and will probably be ultimately more useful than physical notes, since you'll be able to search, edit, or send them to other people.
I have a service business, and one of my clients is a used records, books, cds, dvds, etc. We do a lot of trade work (instead of cash). The wife and I have a room we call "the library" - all of the shelves are mostly overstuffed (double-stacked and two-deep).
Also, while working at the client after hours, they showed me how to open the security cases so I can sample whatever audio I want on the store system - Makes the environment much nicer.
I was that way for years. After accumulating a certain number of cubic meters of books (wish this was hyperbole, but it's not), having shelves to put them on so that they're accessible requires a pretty hardcore commitment in terms of the layout and decor of your home, and moving becomes something of a logistic nightmare.
Many thousands of titles on a nice portable device I can take with me anywhere? Yes, please.
In twenty years, your average $50 ebook reader will have a 300 dpi full-color full-motion transflective screen, readable in sunlight or with a backlight. Most of the weight will be battery. It will have a tiny CPU and a relatively studly GPU, a small amount of permanent storage (less than a terabyte) and a short distance wireless network link, which will feed your headphones if you want sound, or connect to your phone or your house networks.
There will be a secondary screen on the back which displays the book's cover. You will have the option of changing that to anything else you want to display.
Many people will not bother to buy them, because they already carry a phone that can do all that, just with a smaller screen.