Still, many bookstores continue to fight the good fight. After all, many consumers still love the calming ambience they experience when they spend a half hour browsing the shelves of their local bookshop.
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Although e-readers have been around for some time and Amazon's Kindle has gained reasonably good market acceptance, the real disruptive technology has come once again from the company that specialises in disrupting markets with technology, Apple.
The iPad and copy cat Android multi-purpose tablet devices, with a form factor sized and shaped like books, are poised to drive the final nail in the coffin of the traditional book business.
Anyone who doubts this does not yet own an iPad. Once they download their first e-book and read it in bed with the lights off, all doubts will disappear.
Quite simply, reading a book on a good tablet like the iPad is a far superior experience to the old way of doing it. Imagine being able to buy and download instantly any book you wanted and have it sitting on one device without cluttering up space in your home.
You can take your entire library and access it anywhere you want to go - planes, trains, holidays, a park bench.
In fact, e-books also give authors and publishers far more scope to exercise their creativity, allowing them to embed multimedia content, link to references and even interact with their audience.
Is it really plausible that printed books can survive in the wake of this vastly superior technology? Could film cameras survive the digital revolution?
At this moment, the tablet revolution is in its infancy. The moment that tablets become as ubiquitous as mobile phones, books become redundant curiosities from a bygone era.
Some months ago we moved into a new family home and I have four large boxes packed with books stored away. I'm beginning to think that I may never unpack those boxes.
