I’ve started telling people that when we look back 20 years from now, the way we use computers today will look quaint, sort of like punch cards and room sized computers do today.
The "book" is also on my list of quaint things. I don’t think the book is fundamentally going anywhere – yet. While the promise of the electronic book has been a promise for a long time, Amazon’s Kindle might finally deliver on it. Steven Levy has a great article on it in Newsweek titled The Future of Reading (which I – ahem – read online.)
I’ve had a Sony eReader for a year and I "like" it, but don’t love it. The selection of books is weak (I still buy 10 physical books for everyone 1 ebook), it sucks at handling non-Sony eReader format (e.g. PDF’s), it’s not connected to the Internet (so I have to buy books on the computer and connect my eReader to sync them), and it has a bunch of little quirks that add up over time.
I don’t know if Kindle will nail everything, but the description of it sounds awesome. Once I get one and use it for a little while I’ll tell you more. Regardless, I expect I’ll still be lugging my books around with me for a while.