That's an important question, but a different one. Surely we could preserve the collected works of Steig Larsson or J.K. Rowling without asking every reader on

That's an important question, but a different one. Surely we could preserve the collected works of Steig Larsson or J.K. Rowling without asking every reader on Earth to buy and retain a physical copy. (If nothing else, if in three hundred years the works of Steig Larsson are somehow lost, our descendents can just have the archaeologists dig down a few feet, where they will discover a stratum consisting of nothing but remaindered Steig Larsson paperbacks.) More seriously: It's likely that books will continue to have print runs, but the question is the size of those print runs. You can preserve a novel by having twenty librarians in twenty countries run off twenty printed copies and stash each of them in a storage vault. But that market won't support a physical infrastructure of printed-book sellers.