I don't own a kindle, and never will, so I don't know if this is true or not.
Evidently the e-books, including those on library kindles, have a short shelf life of a year or less. After that they 'go away'.
If this is true, the same e-publishing that is supposed to be killing print, may also pump some life back into it.
I've been known to keep a book for over a year before I got around to reading it. When I find something I know that I'm going to like in a used book store, or when I am down in the states in ANY book store, I pick it up and put it in line.
Knowing it might disolve before then would definitely make me choose print rather than pick up a kindle that I COULD use up here.
I had to read your whole post to see what you meant by "go away." I hadn't heard that, though I know libraries buy a certain number of "borrows" for an ebook, and if a book's popularity goes to zero they won't bother to buy any more "borrows."
But yeah, the Kindle only holds a few books, but you supposedly have a "library" of the books you've bought on the cloud, and can supposedly download one to read any time you want, for as long as Amazon lets you do that.
Alternatively, there's a free Kindle reader program for the PC I've considered getting, then I could download any ebooks I buy and keep them on my computer forever, and not have to worry about Amazon being around or changing policies next year or next month, or even deleting it like they did with "1984."
But yes, whatever the details are, the ebook thing (and any possible digital rights management crap) is changing how we buy and handle books.
I love my iPad2. I've only bought one print book since I got it (a compilation of comics for the webcomic, Order of the Stick), and I doubt I'll be buying many novels in print any more.
But even I don't expect ebooks to completely kill the print market. Records haven't disappeared. DVDs still exist. I mean, the automobile didn't even eliminate a use for horses.
The automobile did kill off the buggy whip industry, though the Teamsters Union continued on.
LP's (or "vinyls" as the youngun's call them now!) have been made and sold continuously through the CD and MP3 era. I hear sales are even up in recent years as younger people discover the "good sound of vinyl" (which really is better than the hypercompressed and intentionally distorted (!) sound of CD's in recent decades). They're a tool of DJ's ("Turntablists") and the preferred medium of some audiophiles, but they disappeared from mainstream music stores not long after CD sales overtook them, and then disappeared from the consciousness of the public.
I don't see books disappearing from retail outlets quite so completely, but they WILL become harder to find.