Paper is lighter, more durable, higher resolution and has a much more flexible input system.

I keep all my to-do lists, notes, first drafts, etc. on plain paper. It's not synced over the internet, but since I can just fold it and slip it in my pocket, that doesn't matter. It's not backed up, but since what I write on paper is all temporary I don't really care.

The most important part is that I can scribble things out, and add meaning to things by varying the size, font, color I'm writing in. I can write things sideways, in margins, with arrows connecting them, circled, with my own made up punctuation marks.

I guess I'll see if this Apple tablet catches up on any of these fronts, but I kind of doubt it.

Alive, but gradually slipping towards life support.

Right now my daily habits include regular trips to Borders to browse the books for the price of a coffee. But in another year or two I expect that I will have switched to toting around some kind of tablet/ebook device to get a more flexible reading experience. I've already started feeling constrained by the selection available from a single store. I'm waiting on the technology to settle down a little, work through the early-adopter headaches, and present a really solid experience before I switch, but once I make that switch I'll have no reason to prefer Borders for coffee drinking - I could go anywhere to do my reading. I know I'm not alone in this behavior. I'll buy newspapers sometimes while I'm out, but that's about it.

Borders is already a company in trouble, and I don't see any reason for their fortunes to go up unless they make a drastic business model change to reflect the rise of e-reading. It won't be much different for other booksellers; niche literature will last for longer since they won't be digitized for a while, but mainstream publishing is about to get clobbered.

Paper for writing, sketches, and other creative tasks will stick around for a long time to come, though. I can buy a tiny pocket notebook and pencils for ~$5, and they'll continue to beat out the high-tech stuff for a good many years to come.

The "iSomethingSomething" might be that killer device, or it might wait for another generation or two. There is no "if" in my mind about the overall direction of things, though.

Paper will be very much alive for a long time. For me an ebook is like an abstraction of a book, like the relationship of a TV image of someone to the actual person:) I prefer ebooks for technical stuff though. Paper can also survive for centuries. I have some old letters which are about 150 years old. Have a look at this one http://s551.photobucket.com/albums/ii468/yannisl/?action=vie... ,which was written in a criss-cross fashion to save on paper and most importantly postage! Contrasted to the soft copy of my PhD thesis which was written in ASCII in LaTeX format on an HP 9816 machine is gone!

Alive but with guilt. Whenever I do something on paper now, I notice that a little voice says something like, "You know, you could write that as a txt file and save a piece of paper and it would be searchable. Just sayin'" The voice doesn't stop me, but it does make me pause each time.