Don’t dig the grave of the printed book.  At least,don’t dig it yet. An item in the Wall St Journal reviews the recent sales figures of ebooks and finds that the initial enthusiasms may have run their course. Muti-purpose table type devices seem to be cutting into the sales of e-readers, and the sales of printed books are still pretty good, especially for a medium that was supposed to be on its last legs. One perhaps more sensible prediction than the “all or nothing” cry of the enthusiasts is a rather prosaic wisdom dollop: the two forms will continue to exist, in parallel, for a while, perhaps a long while, to come. Ebooks may become the preferred format for “things I read on the Subway or the El to distract me from the depressing, gritty scenes surrounding me on my ride to work/home”. Printed books may continue as the preferred format for serious works of exposition on difficult topics.  That sounds snobbish,on re-reading, but, just as people have different ‘linguistic registers’ in their speech, depending on whether they’re at dinner with four Nobel laureates and an Archbishop or yelling at their kids, so they may have different format registers, depending on whether they’re reading a Regency Romance or a history of the Crusades.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323874204578219563353697002.html