Nassim Nicholas Taleb made the point in a recent antifragility lecture that if a technology is robust enough to have survived X years and is still in use, it almost assuredly will be around X years from now. By that metric, use of printed books has a minimum of 500 years of life remaining, if not more (depending on your definition of the underlying technology of books). In contrast, look at the fragility of the systems that sustain ebooks, starting with the computing hardware supply chain.
An interesting thought experiment is to think of what it would take for ebooks to become as robust or as antifragile as physical books. For instance, would it require the hardware, power supply, and content to fuse into a form as cheap and ubiquitous as paper (and manufacturing of such hardware within the realm of anyone)? What could enable that? A breakthrough in self-replicating 3D printers that are capable of using recyclable material as printer stock?
An interesting thought experiment is to think of what it would take for ebooks to become as robust or as antifragile as physical books. For instance, would it require the hardware, power supply, and content to fuse into a form as cheap and ubiquitous as paper (and manufacturing of such hardware within the realm of anyone)? What could enable that? A breakthrough in self-replicating 3D printers that are capable of using recyclable material as printer stock?