No, the publishers are probably not going away tomorrow

I personally adore reading on a screen—when my publisher shifted to an all electronic work flow for editorial I was delighted—and it's certainly very likely that e-books will become a large part of books sold sooner rather than later. At the same time, I don't think that books are going away any time soon and I'm not at all certain that the shift to CD and MP3 is a good comparison to a shift to e-readers.

For one thing, the formats killed off by digital music had much shorter histories and tes...