When this becomes obselete, like portable cassette players, they'll be shipped in containers to places like China, to be taken apart or just dumped for landfill, their corrosive parts left to pollute nearby watercourses.
Will this be good for authors? Companies like Amazon and Google want to pay almost nothing to publishers for the ability to offer a vast archive of books to their customers and this means authors getting a small percentage of a small percentage, margins eroded and risks avoided.
Good for customers? Well, a lot of us prefer to order on-line rather than visit a high street outlet where the poorly paid staff can't type the title into a computer, and when they can, they inevitably don't stock the book . Do they suggest they could order it in for you? - no -because those shelves are like real estate, only high volume titles deserve to sit on them. So customers lose out on choice and content themselves with Dan Brown's latest tome or a celebrity's struggle with death, divorce or dieting...
Good for publishers? New technology will create new winners and losers. Those of us who don't have clauses in contracts dealing with electronic rights could find ourselves missing out on the big leap... there will be mergers and acquisitions to gain those e-rights and companies like Google are trying to amass content for free, so setting the precedent that artistic works are not to be valued like other commodities, because surely universal access is a more worthy goal than paying an author for his/her small contribution to the collective pool of great works.
Hogarth is having his work exhibited at the Tate - he was a leading artist of his generation and in 1735 or thereabouts, he was an instigator of a kind of copyright protection - to stop people copying his work and selling it on. I've been to his house in Chiswick. Teaching, painting, engraving and drawing satirical cartoons helped make his fortune.
We publish plays - teachers buy one copy and then photocopy a script for the entire class. Do they pay anything to the Publisher's Licensing Society? Rarely. That's 30 copies pirated by the local comprehensive without a second thought...
E-books? Downloading books for free? It's coming to a small screen near you...
