The book is still thriving in the digital age, but the physical entity that contains information, inspiration, and ideas is being transformed by the technology that was supposed to replace it. A scholar studying the history of technology looks at two alternative futures: one with books and one without.

It was widely believed in the 1990s that the end of the book was near. But if books (and print in general) are dying or dead, why do book sales continue to remain brisk? E-books and other digital products have hardly made a dent in the book market.

The paperless office--the supposed harbinger of the end of the book--has yet to emerge. In fact, offices are actually using more paper, according to researchers Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H.R. Harper.

While the end of the book remains a plausible scenario of the future, this is far from inevitable. Indeed, rather than hastening the end of the book, computers and other new technologies may in fact be enhancing our ability to produce and distribute printed books, ensuring that books will continue to be a part of our future.

Among the forces driving the future of the book are the availability of specific digital technologies, the preferences of consumers, and the economics of information. The future of the book, I believe, will largely be determined according to which model of the economics of information emerges: Either books will disappear as a viable technology because digital information becomes a "commons," or they will remain a vital information technology because the concept of intellectual property will remain in place.

If we truly live "in the late age of print," as literary theorist Jay David Bolter posited in 1991, this will be because the production and distribution of written words will increasingly migrate into cyberspace. Instead of holding a physical object, readers would be looking at a screen, which would replace the page as our interface with written language. This screen need not be the computer monitor that currently sits on our desk; handheld e-books may well be that interface. These devises may soon have the capabilities of wireless technologies, meaning that a reader could download an entire text into the e-book as one might download a file into a stationary hard drive. College students would need only to have access to an e-book, and then they could download all of their textbooks. An entire book bag worth of textbooks could be easily stored in one e-book device.

Electronic publishing in journals is already commonplace among scholars: The author prepares the journal manuscript as an electronic document and e-mails it to the editor without ever creating a paper version. The journal editors then work with this electronic document, editing it and formatting it. Only at the end of the process does the production staff of that journal convert the electronic document into a printed paper version that can then be bound between covers and shipped to libraries.

Online journals omit that final step: Rather than printing and binding a paper version, the editors simply upload the electronic article to the Web site for access by subscribers. In some cases, access is free, which is possible because, unlike for a print journal, the distribution costs are essentially zero.

Modern economic theory is based on the study of the scarcity and exclusivity of material goods; that is, goods are valuable either because they can be used up or because they can be used by only one person at a time. If I burn a lump of coal, I cannot then hand it over to you to use; if I buy an automobile, no one else can have it at the same time.

Information, on the other hand, is non-rival and non-excludable; that is, it can be shared by two or more people and used at the same time and for the same cost. When reading an online version of a written text, thousands of people can read the same article at the same time. The cost to reproduce this article for all those readers is next to nothing, as opposed to a print version of the article. By having access to this digital article, a reader does not have exclusive use of the article. Because the article can be easily and cheaply reproduced, your reading it does not exclude another reader from reading the same article. Unlike with a lump of coal, many readers can use the same digital article without ever "using up" the information; unlike a physical object, information cannot be exhausted. When produced and distributed digitally, information can retain its non-rival, non-excludable form. Information is not a material object, and the explosion of the Web has demonstrated that information is simply evanescent bits of data that are not subject to the conventional laws of economics.

Prior to the arrival of the printing press, medieval scholars treated ideas not as "intellectual property," but rather as something held in common by everyone. The Internet was originally designed as a commons, and the ideas that flow across it should similarly be viewed as a commons, not as intellectual property, argues legal scholar Lawrence Lessig in The Future of Ideas.

When one "divulges an idea," one is "publishing" that idea in the sense of making it public. An idea in my mind is private; once this idea leaves my mind, however, I have made it public. Indeed, prior to the printing press, to publish was to make public an idea, either by reading aloud or by distributing it in written form. Ideas, Thomas Jefferson famously noted, are like a candle's flame: Lighting your candle with mine does not diminish the amount of my flame. Ideas, he argued, should spread over the globe, for the edification of mankind. And this is what has emerged with the flow of bits of information through cyberspace, spreading freely for the benefit of all.

At least, that's the potential of the Internet. The reality is that large media corporations--middlemen--have, in critic Lessig's estimation, misused the idea of copyright to maintain stultifying control over ideas, including those flowing through cyberspace. Shutting down Napster, the music-sharing Web site, is but the tip of the iceberg, as media giants will make every effort to maintain control over film, music, written words, computer code, and a whole host of ideas that could potentially flow through cyberspace.

Cutting out the middlemen is now easier, however. For example, electronic production and distribution could change the economics of comic books (and possibly all books), benefiting the authors and their readers, notes cartoonist Scott McCloud. In Reinventing Comics, McCloud writes that digital technology can allow artists, writers, and other creators of content to maintain greater control of their work and keep more of the proceeds from it. The average price of a comic book is about $3, out of which the publishers, printers, distributors, warehousers, and sellers all take their cuts, leaving the creator with just 30¢, observes McCloud. An electronically distributed subscription-based system controlled by creators would allow more sharing of ideas and still allow creators to keep the profits. An obstacle to this vision is that readers may not be willing to pay for content on the Web. So far, few people have been willing to pay for online content.

In this scenario, intellectual property will disappear because the physical containers for that property --including printed books--will have disappeared. Digitalization makes written language cheaply and easily reproduced, distributed instantaneously, to be used simultaneously by all.

The historical significance of the printed book was that it turned written information into intellectual property, a physical commodity, whose distribution can be controlled. Contained in a printed form, ideas and information are made material, subject to the same laws of supply and demand that govern all other physical objects.

If books continue to exist in the future, it will be because there is an economic incentive. Authors and other copyright holders will want to maintain their intellectual property. Books will survive because they are material, because they are tangible objects--not in spite of this fact, as technophiles often claim. This is not the same as the argument that says books will survive because readers find them easier to take to the beach. Instead, my argument is that the economics of intellectual property will necessitate its survival in printed, bound, old-fashioned book form.

The computer may be more like the printing press than we ever imagined before. The printing press transformed the production and distribution of writing, but not its form or structure. It is possible that the computer will have a similar effect on the production and distribution of printed books. Books in the future may very well be different from the books we read now. But in form, they will seem very familiar to us.

Computers may alter the production and distribution of books but have little effect on their physical appearance. Consider print-on-demand technology, for instance. With print-on-demand, the written text is stored electronically; when a customer wants a copy of the book, it can be printed and bound (one copy or a hundred) and then shipped. Shoppers may one day find book-making kiosks in bookstores; in the same way that today one can order a custom-made card from a Hallmark kiosk, a customer in the future could order a book from a menu of choices, wait 15 minutes or so while the device prints off and binds a copy, and walk out of the store with a new book. We might even envision a similar technology in the home; rather than ordering a book from Amazon.com and waiting for it to be shipped via UPS, one could simply produce the book at home. Such just-in-time production methods mean that a publisher can match supply and demand for books with some precision. Rather than producing 10,000 copies of a book and selling only 500, a publisher can print off only the number of books that satisfies demand. In theory, a book would never go out of print; it would simply idle in electronic form until ready to be made material in book form. Rather than spreading the electronic bits freely across cyberspace, however, the publisher would parcel out the information only to those who wish to pay for its material form. But note: The finished product of this computerized process is a physical object in book form.

While a book in the future might look very similar to the books of today, the pages in that book might look very different. Xerox's PARC research lab recently unveiled "smart paper" technology called Gyricon. (A similar technology has been developed by E Ink and Philips Electronics.) This is a thin, flexible, rubbery sheet made up of millions of small balls, black on one side, white on the other. When charged, the balls that are rotated to the black side would make a mark on the remaining white background. Smart paper looks something like an LCD screen, but the surface is flexible rather than rigid, more like a sheet of paper.

A future "smart book" might consist of hundreds of smart paper pages bound within a cover; the "spine" would hold the electronic components. You could download a text like an e-book, yet enjoy the feel of a traditional printed book. But unlike a printed book, a smart-paper book could display dynamic and animated visual data like that we see on computer screens. A smart-paper book would be as different from a printed book as the first printed books were from medieval manuscripts. But in physical, tangible form, a smart-paper book would seem very familiar to a reader of a print book.

Even without the help of smart paper, books will find other ways to mimic computers' multimedia and hypertext environments, with more graphics or tactile elements incorporated, for instance. (Imagine reading a Zane Grey novel of the Old West on pages that feel like denim.) In the future, books and "text on the screen" may coexist, but those books will increasingly imitate the multimedia space of the screen. In this scenario, the "materiality" of the book will not disappear; quite the contrary, books will become "hyper-material."

If books survive, it will be because of their materiality, not in spite of it. As a physical object, a book is a container of ideas; it is thus rivalrous and excludable--conditions necessary to maintain intellectual property rights. If books survive as a vital information technology, it will be because it is in the economic interests of authors and publishers to maintain books in tangible, physical form.

A major reason why books have not yet disappeared--and may never disappear--is that a new economics of information has yet to replace intellectual property. Judging by sales, subscription-based electronic books of the type advocated by cartoonist Scott McCloud have not been warmly received by readers. The reason may be that if digital information is non-rival (i.e., we can all share it), and if cyberspace is the ideal vehicle for freely distributing this non-rival information, then why would anyone pay for such information?

If digital authors want to be paid for their work, they might have to do as television broadcasters have done and charge for advertising space embedded within their electronic pages. This is a realistic possibility. Electronic books might begin to look like so many Web pages do today, covered with advertisements, with others popping up in new windows. Electronic authors could also resort to fund-raising in the same way that public broadcasters provide content for free but ask viewers to pledge money.

On the supply side of the equation, we might also ask what the incentive will be for authors to create. In The Future of Ideas, Lawrence Lessig envisions an online world where creators--of software code, of music, of written information--create their content and distribute it for free, because that was the original intention of the Internet. Creators would find it very difficult to profit in such a system; in fact, it would seem that only those who were independently wealthy or who had some other source of income would be able to create content, since they could not rely on their creations as a source of income.

In Lessig's model, information creators would resemble today's academics, most of whom write not to make money but to establish an academic reputation. An additional line on a curriculum vitae is its own kind of currency and is usually payment enough for much of the writing that academics do. Of course, the invention of the book allowed authors to live off the proceeds of their work, freeing them from the patronage system that had funded writers before them. In Lessig's digital future, writers would need to be amateurs or academics, or else they would once again require a patron in order to freely distribute their ideas.

If producers and consumers cease to think of information as property, if ideas return to the medieval concept of a freely available commons, then books will not be needed, since only the evanescent bits of information will matter. In fact, books would hinder access to this commons. We really would be living in the late age of print. However, the uncertain economic questions that have arisen about digital information--Who will pay? Who will produce?--might never be properly answered, ensuring the continuity of our current system of intellectual property rights well into the future.

Technological change alone will not hasten the end of the book. Rather, economic factors--the behavior of the producers and consumers of information--will play a more important role. If information remains a form of intellectual property, then authors and publishers will continue to maintain control over this property via the best available technology: the printed book.

Earlier versions of this article were published in 21st Century Opportunities and Challenges (World Future Society, 2003) and in Journal of the Association for History and Computing (April 2003).

Diagram shows how particles of electronic ink are manipulated to change shape.

Electronic Ink Display prototype developed by Philips and E Ink offers comfortable, book-like viewing experience of text and images.

The future of the book? What is old may be made new again, as the Electronic Ink Display by Philips and E Ink demonstrates.