Stowe Boyd

The Future Of Books: A Dystopian Timeline | TechCrunch

John Boggs projects a timeline for books transitioning to digital.

John Biggs via TechCrunch

2013 – EBook sales surpass all other book sales, even used books. EMagazines begin cutting into paper magazine sales.
2014 – Publishers begin “subsidized” e-reader trials. Newspapers, magazines, and book publishers will attempt to create hardware lockins for their wares. They will fail.
2015 – The death of the Mom and Pops. Smaller book stores will use the real estate to sell coffee and Wi-Fi. Collectable bookstores will still exist in the margins.
2016 – Lifestyle magazines as well as most popular Conde Nast titles will go tablet-only.
2018 – The last Barnes & Noble store converts to a cafe and digital access point.
2019 – B&N and Amazon’s publishing arms – including self-pub – will dwarf all other publishing.
2019 – The great culling of the publishers. Smaller houses may survive but not many of them. The giants like Random House and Penguin will calve their smaller houses into e-only ventures. The last of the “publisher subsidized” tablet devices will falter.
2020 – Nearly every middle school to college student will have an e-reader. Textbooks will slowly disappear.
2023 – Epaper will make ereaders as thin as a few sheets of paper.
2025 – The transition is complete even in most of the developing world. The book is, at best, an artifact and at worst a nuisance. Book collections won’t disappear – hold-outs will exist and a subset of readers will still print books – but generally all publishing will exist digitally.

I think this is too slow for the technological West and way too slow for the less advanced world in terms of adoption and availability.

For example, there will be thriving (short term) businesses in the US buying paper textbooks which will be packaged up and shipped to third world countries. But ereaders will rapidly — 2015? — become the norm, since they can play on people’s mobile devices, including our genius phones.

And Biggs is really off when he calls this dystopian. It’s just emphemeralization, where information technology allows us to move bits around instead of atoms.