Thesis: Electronic books will outsell paper books by the year 2050.
To those of you who on reading that react by thinking, “Of course they will!” I’d like to direct you toward some data from the World Resource Institude which indicates that from 1995 to 2005, worldwide paper consumption had increased 27% (12% in the developed world and 70% in the developing world). The implication being that there is a significant challenge to extending E-book usage to the developing world, as it is highly dependent on reliable electricity to read and Internet access to distribute.
E-book Wholesale Revenue
Others might look at my thesis and think, “There’s no possible way.” To them I will begin by pointing out some statistics about the growth of E-book revenue over the past 5 years. From Q1 2004 to Q1 2009, E-book wholesale revenue has increased by 1,338%. Those biggest gains are from the most recent quarter, so if that turns out to be a temporary spike the trend lines could be closer to the true growth rate.
That said, e-books still only constitute 0.5% of the entire book market. Even at that small starting point though, if e-book sales continue to grow at the rate indicated in the orange line (10.07% per quarter), e-book sales could be greater than 50% of the book market by the year 2025. Don’t be foolish enough to think you can bet on that though. Nothing is ever that simple.
There are a lot of benefits to e-books; zero weight, zero volume, easily quoted, highly portable, easily stored, easily distributed and potentially easily shared (though I’m sure the industry will do it’s best to keep that feature controlled). They are also hard to read, since you need a display that won’t burn your eyes and is as easy to carry around as a paper book would be. The problem of permeating the book market is one of making e-books just as easily read as regular books, which is a technological problem.
Amazon has leaped headlong into this market with the release of their Kindle product line. While plenty of people have looked at the device and decided that it deserves their business, it is far from attracting the scale of user base needed to transform the industry. Sony has also had a reader on the market for a while, though it has not sold nearly as well as the Kindle. There are also rumors that Apple is developing a competing product, which would fit well into their preexisting infrastructure for the Ipod.
We have an ongoing example of an analog publishing medium being replaced with a digital publishing medium in the gradual switch to digital music. Apple started the itunes music store in 2003 as a service to an incredibly small market of mac users who had this new device called an ‘ipod’, or were willing to listen to music on their computers. Today the digital music publishing medium has grown to more than 10% of the entire music market and is projected to grow to 40% by the year 2012. The user base for itunes started small, and stayed small for a while, until seemingly overnight the mainstream became aware of the significant real benefits and lower cost of digital music over cumbersome CD’s. For more on this type of growth scenario, the kindle edition of “Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell is available for $8.54, with no shipping charge since it’s just a download. 
A related issue here is Digital Rights Management (DRM). This was used in the early days of itunes and other services to try to relax publisher’s about piracy in this new medium. As of now, DRM is almost completely out of the digital music market, but is still alive and well in the ebook market. The fact is that nearly zero distribution cost increases the supply of a product by a large factor. DRM is an attempt to limit that factor to legal bounds, but that fight is one that I doubt will ever fully succeed.
I do agree with your thesis.
The newspaper industry is losing due to the competition of the internet. Big name newspapers such as the Washington Post and New York Time are switching to online news sites that pay for their services instead of paper.
E-books will do the same to normal books, but some small steps need to be develop before e-books.
Users need to be able to edit the e-book easily. This can be done with touch screen technology, or other methods.
Battery life. Although, batteries have becoming efficient with e-books. Battery life will always be a concern.
Introduction of color to e-books. The majority of books are printed black and white, but some books are in color. The use of color will give the option for the user to see pictures, charts, and graphs.
and, the ability for users to send a e-book file by using the internet, email, and wi-fi.
Picture a company wants to send a memo to all their employees. All they need to do is send the memo is a click of a few buttons, and the data will be sent.