eBooks Heralding the End of Centuries?

In the Guardian, an interesting take on the coming of eBooks from Ian Jack:

Lenin had a famous equation: communism = the power of the Soviets + electricity. An optimist might adapt that to: publishing = the power of the author + electricity. The ebook abolishes the cost of ink, paper, binding, warehousing and shipping, as well as, further down the chain, salaries and overheads in bookstores, supposing they survive. On paper – inappropriate phrase – the benefits look like increased profits to the publisher (because so much of the cost has been stripped out), improved royalties to the author and lower prices and more houseroom for the reader. Another way to look at it, however, is through the paradigm of supermarkets and their suppliers, in which Amazon and iBookstore are Tesco, the publishers are the vegetable growers working on thin margins and the authors are the vegetables.

Full article here.

The slant of the article is scared, observing the inevitable reduced print run and commercial squeezes to come – the possibilities arising from adoption of the new technology, potentially enabling entirely new forms of literature to exist are not even raised.