Anthony Daniels at The New Criterion muses on what appears to be its inevitable slide into irrelevance and obsolescence. He doesn't ignore the conveniences of electronic publishing, but like everyone who loves books he isn't happy about the trend. This is probably definitive evidence for the contention that the trend will not be reversed (barring some more or less catastrophic events that would make the electronic book no longer viable):
A bookseller, from whom I had been buying for nearly forty years, and with whom I had grown old, told me, shortly before he closed down his shop, that the nature of customers had changed over the years. True browsers like me, who were content to spend two or three hours among the dust to find something of whose existence they previously had had no inkling, but which, by a process of elective affinity, aroused their interest and even sparked a passion, were few and were old. In so far as young people came into his shop at all, they came to enquire whether he had such and such a book, usually required reading for some course or other; and if he had not, they left immediately, having no further interest in his stock. Their need for the book in question must have been urgent, since it was available online for delivery next day; they must have been late with an assignment. So if youth were the future, the future, at least for second-hand booksellers with shops, was bleak.
This was a genuine cultural change, my bookseller said, and not just the complaint of a man who had grown old without seeing the time pass. When he started out in the trade, young people browsed in the way that only the old now did; and so he had been overtaken by a change that owed nothing to him, as wheelwrights, coopers, or blacksmiths had once been overtaken.
As it happens, I've recently been reading a book on a Kindle for the first time, and although there are some things I like about it I would much rather have an actual book.
And I don't really like to admit it to myself, but this is true of me:
…if it had not been for the necessity of earning my living in a more practical way, I could easily, and perhaps happily, have turned into a complete bookworm, or one of those creatures like the silverfish and the small, fragile, scaly moths that spend their entire lives among obscure and seldom disturbed volumes. I would have not read to live, but lived to read.
I don't think I would need the "perhaps" qualifier. I have a very, very happy memory of the moment during my brief time as a graduate student when I came across the bound volumes of The Criterion in the library. I had some notion that a time would come when I would have the leisure to stay in the library all day, and read them all if I wanted to. I think it was probably the feeling that some men have contemplating a retirement in which they would have nothing to do but fish or play golf.
Light On Dark Water 
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