This would follow the same path as the music industry and the revival of vinyl record albums. Most are collected and not played since streaming is so much easier and portable. I would go further and say that paperbacks will fall almost completely out of favor as they are less durable and could be seen as more of a "waste" environmentally. A bookshelf in a home is still a wall of virtue and interest signals and I don't think that will go away completely.

Record stores that still exist aroud me seem to have travelled back in time, I now feel like the first days of the CD sales, where they were at a corner in a shop full of vynil records.

Also someone is buying those vynil players with bluetooth and USB connectors.

There’s still a large “I like the feel of a real book even if it’s a paperback” contingent. But I assume that is much less true of relatively younger people. (I’ve gotten rid of a lot of my books that are in the public domain and would largely clear out most of my paperbacks if I could magically get them in digital format.

My daughters (gen Z) prefer physical books, though we'll see if that persists past the first time they have to move apartments themselves.

i have some rare paperbacks that have insurable value. this is a counterpoint to the assumption that paperbacks are worthless.

Of course rare books are valuable. The point is that if you want to buy a physical book you probably will pay $10-15 more for the nice version. The market for the cheap entry is smaller.

Paper books have legal value - you have rights to resell it, for instance, that you don't have for ebooks. Until we unfuck those, ebooks will never completely replace them.

Paper books aren't particularly environmentally wasteful - if you buy one extra electronic device (say, an ereader), that basically outstrips the damage of any number of books you'd buy. That might not be relevant to the perception, though.

Books as expensive wallpaper will definitely keep being a thing while dead-tree books are common, but they're fundamentally about conveying an impression, and impressions can change - if ebooks become the overwhelming majority to the point that office decoration is the main point of books, then anyone who sees the bookshelf will assume you're a poser doing it for the image, and thus people will stop doing it. So wallpaper-bookshelves can't exist as a sole purpose of books (probably).

You take away the importance of getting bookstore shelf space, material marketing and book tours (good luck getting that), etc. and publishers add less and less for a huge cut. As I commented ed elsewhere I almost certainly benefited non-monetarily from going with a well-known technical publisher but I wouldn’t do it going forward at this point for various reasons.

> In the niches of fantasy I read there are no traditionally published authors any more, they all monetise via patreon, kindle unlimited and audible. From what I've gleaned no traditional publisher can compete with this.

I see this too, but I've also seen the next step: Publishers chase them down for book deals. Azarinth Healer is the one that comes to mind (since I'm working through Book 3 again), where the author monetized via Patreon for years, then got a publishing deal through Portal.

Honestly, it's been a good thing overall. The audiobooks are high quality, and the editing has done the story a tremendous amount of good.

Moving from self published Patron into traditional publishing is a bumpy ride. To use your example, Azarinth Healer’s author significantly reduced output while working on editing the book without disclosing why they were doing so. They then didn’t hand out copies of the edited work on Patron thus massively discouraging people from continuing to support them.

I went through that process a few times with minor variations and it’s annoyed me enough that I decided to permanently boycott both Amazon (including AWS) and Patron.

The reverse where traditional authors give fans more access on Patron is less problematic, but also distracts from actually writing.

A bit of a tangent about Azarinth Healer's journey to follow, with a more generic wrapup...

> To use your example, Azarinth Healer’s author significantly reduced output while working on editing the book without disclosing why they were doing so.

Interesting. This drama must have been largely contained to Discord, since I never really saw it come up in Patreon itself. Plus, their output has been a bit unpredictable due to real life mental health complications for years. Notably, though, supporters on Patreon were not charged when they were not producing new chapters.

Ultimately reduced output, especially for the sake of fixing prior works for publishing, is acceptable to me.

> They then didn’t hand out copies of the edited work on Patron thus massively discouraging people from continuing to support them.

The author probably couldn't. They can't even keep the un-edited version up on Royal Road, so the contract probably stipulated what could and could not be done with the edited manuscript. And, honestly, I'm OK with that. Since Patreon charges have been turned off for awhile, paying $5 for the edited books is acceptable IMO.

> distracts from actually writing

Authors gotta market their work; even traditional publishers aren't doing that nearly as much anymore.

While output might be the key metric that some readers judge authors by, at the end of the day it's not the metric authors need to worry about the most. An author who can't support themselves by writing will produce even less output than one who is bound by the need to make money.

At the end of the day, I have a hard time being sour about authors - Rhegar included - finding a way to earn a living off writing.

You can print hardcover on demand too these days.