It's been consistently shown that there has been no decline in the sale of 'paper' books, and the e-book sales are currently an entirely independent market with

It's been consistently shown that there has been no decline in the sale of 'paper' books, and the e-book sales are currently an entirely independent market with no effect on sales in the traditional market. While I agree that his hyperbole was a bit over the top I also think that you're playing it down a bit too much. The e-ink technology is making its first babysteps just now but it's already clear that we'll have true e-paper (bendable, rollable displays) in the near future. Ten years from now you may still be able to buy dead-tree books. But I'm pretty sure they and especially newspapers and magazines will be on a sharp decline, in favor to just downloading the content to your personal reader device. Twenty years from now our kids will shake their heads about that past era of dead-tree books, just like today they wonder how we could ever exist without cellphones. A common, parental dialogue in 2029: "No search-function, no hyperlinks, no updates, no dictionary lookup? Are you kidding me, daddy?"