Susan Hayes, the director of literature at the Australia Council for the Arts, has an op-ed in The Australian entitled Books will survive, but not on paper arguing that the paper book, as we know it, will gradually disappear from our shelves over the next 10 years with the emergence of e-books and e-reader's such as the Kindle-2 all its e-ink cousins, future ebook tablets from Apple and other phone makers that are all designed to emulate the experience of reading printed material.

Hayes' duality is a bit stark as the paper book will survive in a niche market. However, her concern is with the effects of this transition to digital on the publishing industry:

While the multinationals are already taking advantage of both the publishing and global marketing opportunities offered by the new technologies, small independent publishers are struggling. Operating on low staffing levels and even lower profit margins, they do not have the necessary in-house expertise or the IT equipment capable of taking on this new level of sophistication.Paradoxically, I believe that those who have already gone to an all digital output, investing in skills and technology rather than paper, have more chance of keeping pace with their more powerful rivals. It's the cost of putting out simultaneous online and paper versions of a book that will put some companies out of business.

The book's reinvention in a networked environment means that it becomes an evolving entity within an ecology of readers, authors and texts. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is never finished: it is always a work in progress. Don Stein says that it is a continuously evolving text, as the authors add new findings in their work and engage in back and forth with "readers" who have begun to learn history by "doing history", and have begun both to question the authors' conclusions and to suggest new sources and alternative syntheses:

On the surface that sounds a lot like a Wikipedia article, in the sense that it's always in process and consideration of the the back and forth is crucial to making sense of the whole. However it's also different, because a defining aspect of the Wikipedia is that once an article is started, there is no special, ongoing role accorded to the the person who initiated it or tends it over time. And that's definitely not what I'm talking about here. Locating discourse in a dynamic network doesn't erase the distinction between authors and readers, but it significantly flattens the traditional perceived hierarchy.