Here is my prediction: books will disappear. Soon. And suddenly. Arguments why I may be wrong follow below. They are all followed by counter-arguments that indicate that I may be right anyhow.
Books never run out of power. True, but electronic devices nowadays rarely run out of power either. A digital watch can run for years without recharging. One could easily make an electronic book that could last for very long time.
It is nice to touch a book and the paper in it. True. It is also nice to touch a vinyl record, not to mention a fountain pen. They are no longer available in the main stream market.
Backlit screens hurt the eyes. They used to do, but modern high quality ones do not.
Books are cheaper than e-books. It matters less if you lose one. You can buy digital watches for less than a dollar. It would be possible to produce e-books at very cheap prices as well.
E-books are almost as expensive as real books. Yes, today. However that is just a commercial decision. All the classics could (and should) be free for e-books. That's a price with which real books can never compete.
E-books are too small. E-books have the size the manufacturer chooses. For people who want them in their pockets, they can be small. For people who want big ones, they can be big. Just like normal books.
E-books are too complicated to load. E-books currently are often not easy to load, but that is a problem with software design. Nothing would prevent a manufacturer to create a point and click device which would be at least as easy, as it is to go to the city centre to buy the paper book you are looking for. And potentially all text-files available on the internet can immediately be available for you - regardless of language and origin. If you want a particular paper book from India, it may turn out impossible, if there is no local distributor of Indian books and if the Indian publisher does not do mail-order. If the same book is available electronically through the internet, there is no restriction - you can get it within seconds, instead of not at all.
E-books never get sentimental value. It is true that a copy of an early edition of an e-book hardly has any additional value. However, that makes them more widely available - not less.
A paper book does not break if you drop it. Neither does a well designed e-book.
If you spell coffee on a paper book, it is still readable. Yes, but it gets a coffee stain for ever. A well designed e-book is water proof enough to handle a few drops of coffee, which can be wiped off with no visible trace.
A paper book can be read in direct sunlight. Currently the paper book wins that match, as electronic screens mostly are difficult to read in the sun. However, in dark situations, like in a badly lit bus or a hotel room with bad lamps, an e-book with backlit screen is easier to read than a paper book. Besides, if you are out in the sun, should you not enjoy the view rather than read a book?
One cannot scratch notes in the margin of an e-book. Not yet - no. However, there are such a lot of other things one can do with electronic texts: copy parts of them with no risk of errors, make a full text search through War and Peace, change the size of the font to get the right one for your eyes, and so on.
So, why have e-books not caught on yet? Because of commercial concerns. The publishers do not want to release books in formats that can be copied freely, as that would limit their sales. And people are unwilling to pay for books they cannot copy freely, and which they may not even be able to read in a few years, if there then is no available reader for that format.
As far as I know neither Sony's Librié nor Amazon's Kindle have very good support for anything but their own books. This concept is of course broken. The perfect e-book should not be a dedicated device that only reads books. It should be integrated in your phone or PDA or even your digital camera. And it should support all kinds of files and encodings in all languages.
There is no such device today. But once it will come, there will be no way back, and paper books will be doomed.
You can get prepared for this already today. Get rid of your paper books right now. Just send them all to me, so I get something to read.
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