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We authors certainly don't know what is going to happen to our books. Are they going to disappear into the ether, following music downloads, or are ebooks going to open up a whole new world of readers? And how much are we being paid per copy? We haven't a clue.

Remember that just because major publishing is having trouble, that doesn't mean people have stopped reading books. Printed books won't go away, but ebooks won't go away, either.

I see publishers bemoaning their fate and saying that this is the end of publishing. No! Publishers will recreate themselves. Some of that comes from my experience as a print publisher.

It seems the world of book publishing is constantly changing. Whether it was the rise of chain stores or their decline, or the digital revolution... fortunately, we have been able not only to adapt but to thrive.

We don't want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods.

The revolutionary process by which all books, old and new, in all languages, will soon be available digitally, at practically no cost for storage and delivery, to a radically decentralized world-wide market at the click of a mouse, is irreversible.

The publishing industry has always wanted to make books as cheaply and as ephemerally as they could; it's nothing new.

Publishers, naturally, loathe used books and have developed strategies to depress the secondhand market. They bring out new, even more expensive editions of popular textbooks every three to four years, in a classic cycle of planned obsolescence.

The printed word will be around long after many of our digital creations are gone, either because books don't require monthly hosting, and blogs and websites do... or because the languages and platforms for which a particular digital creation was published will become obsolete.