[quote name=\'clemon79\' post=\'222790\' date=\'Aug 12 2009, 12:51 PM\'][quote name=\'Jimmy Owen\' post=\'222784\' date=\'Aug 12 2009, 10:33 AM\']Will there come a day when there will be no bookstores or publishers? If you want a book, you can print the PDF file for a small fee on your own paper.[/quote]
I suspect that actual physical books will become an artisan product in the next ten to fifteen years.
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Wow, this is going far afield.
Being in the profession, I can safely say mass production of books aren't going away any time soon. Kindle may be used to supplement it -- and it's certainly a better option than e-books were a decade ago, with many more choices, including newspapers and magazines -- but it will not completely change it.
The change you are seeing, and will continue to see, will be in school books, especially K-12. They're very expensive to print -- and for every social studies, science, or math book you see, remember it's already been printed once (in a smaller quantity) to send to the states for adoption -- and not easy for the students to use (and carry -- seen those backpacks lately?). What I can see over the next 20 years or so, as students get to the point where each desk has a computer, is all textbooks become electronic, either on line or purchased by the school system. This will save a lot in print, and it'll make state-specific editions easier to do (so 20 years down the road, you'll have 75 percent of the states learning about evolution, while Texas and Kansas have intelligent design). Students could access them both in the classroom and at home, perhaps through the school's web site.
While Kindle is far better than the previous e-books, and will be cheaper as time goes along, it won't replace books. Unlike movies/TV (which have gone from big screen only to TV to VCR to DVD to laptop) or music (vinyl to cassette to CDs to MP3s on IPods), books are still easy to use, portable, and easier to reproduce in book form than anything else. (Do you really want to carry around 300 pages of 8-1/2" x 11" sheets instead of a regular book?) Also, there's pride in ownership -- like it or not, a bookcase or two full of books (or, in the case of Karen and me, ten bookcases) makes a very favorable impression on people. (Until they see the actual titles, in some cases -- my opinion of the previous owners of my house started badly when I saw several Phyllis Schlafly-authored titles on the shelves.)
Print on demand, as noted before, is useful in very small quantities. However, it's not cost effective at much over 2,500 copies (which is a very low run on a regular press), and most POD plants don't print color very well (with a few exceptions, POD is a souped-up Xerox machine). It's best for softcover books (binding three copies hardcover makes them prohibitively expensive, if I remember correctly). And it's not going to look as good as the original book.
Okay, my time on the soapbox is done.
