At 11:52 PM 11/8/2001 -0800, you wrote:
Susan Beth wrote:
I still think paper fanzines will go extinct as soon as some e-book reader gets widely accepted.
Oh, I really hope not. I prefer reading print on a page, and turning the pages. Surely I'm not the only one?
Not at all. But it may become a question of the paper version of a book being an expensive luxury you indulge in for special books while 'ordinary' read once books you buy electronically. Sort of like today's situation carried further. Today you can buy the latest Robert Parker mystery in hardcover for around $20 or as a paperback for around $6. In the future you might have a choice of the paper edition as a luxury item (perhaps with hand-sewn signatures and tooled leather covers -- if it's a luxury item, might as well go all out) or the downloaded version.
So it might be that the 'average' person in future only owns paper copies of a handful of books (like a Bible from confirmation, the copy of Shakespeare they won for scholarship, the particular books they absolutely love and read over and over) while the Jet Set shows off with whole bookcases full of paper.
But you're assuming that future ebooks will look like today's -- and that may not be so. One person has proposed an ebook that essentially would look like a hardcover book: a bunch of pages with a hard cover and spine. The pages would be made from some plastic that looks like paper but each tiny sub-unit of it can be changed from black to white. So you'd load the book with whatever you wanted to read, and then read it like today, paging through actual pages. Apparently they already have a plastic they can make do the color change, it would 'just' be a question of controlling the zillion littles bits of it to create the appearance of ink-printed writing on it. In that case you'd own what looked like a 'real' book, it's just that you'd only need to own one of them which turned at your pleasure into any book.