2. Dinner plates were invented before books but there are many place in the world today where people eat on banana leaf. In fact it is not fashionable in Singapore or Malaysia if some of your dishes are not served on Banana leaf held inside a plate to hold food! So much for dinner plates replacing banana leaf!

3. Books like Bible and Koran will be printed and sold and bought and read for millions of years unless the concept of religion dies first. Cost has nothing to do with their printing, selling, buying or reading.

4. Any bold claim that any technology will kill any other should be made with great care. For example: Planes have not killed trains yet. Even long distance ones.

And in cities like Sydney, CBD roads are being constrained for cars to allow bicycles, with the result that often a long caravan of cars has to travel at 5 KMPH in peak hours – at the speed of the bicyclist in the front, leading and occupying main lanes of the CBD where there are no lanes, and sometimes ever where there are lanes (because it is not illegal for a bike to be on any lane). So much for cars killing bicycles.

5. Internet, working from home and broadband has yet not killed office in cities (they may more likely die though due to rising rents and real estate prices).

6. There are more things killed by the economy and economics than technology will ever kill. But nothing will kill a printing press.

You also overlook the fact that (except for a few audiophiles who insist otherwise), there is zero benefit to the old physical media distributions of music and video compared to the current digital versions. This is not true of books. All music and video formats required expensive players, so shifting from turntables to CD players, for example, was not a big deal. Books (unlike e-books) do not require ancillary technology. Books, while not searchable, are more easily skimmed and flipped through than e-books on a Kindle or iPad. Books can be read on a plane. Books don’t have to worry about battery life. Books survive water and crushing and being dropped off of tall buildings. I want my first aid and disaster survival handbooks on paper, not on my iPad. I’m not taking my Kindle sailing with me.

I think, too, you overestimate the cost to the publisher of converting a digital book to a printed copy. Current print-on-demand technology makes it little more difficult than printing out the PDF of the content on a laser printer. There’s no magic collapse if print runs get cut in half or even 2/3s, just perhaps a small loss of quality and differentiation (though not as much difference as switching to digital in the first place).