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John Green has been talk­ing about the future of the book on his blog. Like many, John pre­dicts that the book­store an entity will dis­ap­pear, much the way that the cor­ner record store went away. I bet him a clas­sic comic that his dire pre­dic­tion was wrong. If I’m wrong and still ambu­la­tory in 10 years, I’ll pay up.

Here’s why the book is not going to go the way of the album/LP/CD. The cre­ation of dig­i­tal for­mats for music play­back was a huge inno­va­tion that so dras­ti­cally improved the lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence that it made the older for­mat obso­lete. Lis­ten­ing to a song on your com­puter, iPod, etc is a much bet­ter expe­ri­ence than putting a piece of scratchy, pop­ping vinyl on a turntable.

Once songs were in a dig­i­tal for­mat, it was a nat­ural step to share them elec­tron­i­cally. Remem­ber that users were doing this long before iTunes rev­o­lu­tion­ized the music shop­ping experience–it’s called steal­ing. The retail expe­ri­ence changed because the end user process changed and record com­pa­nies were los­ing buck­ets of money.

Putting books in an elec­tronic for­mat changes next to noth­ing. Sure, with a Kin­dle, you can down­load books from Ama­zon (until they decide that you don’t own what you own, but that’s a dif­fer­ent story), but the read­ing expe­ri­ence is still the same–lines of words on a screen looks the same as lines of words on a piece of paper. You’re not going to enjoy the act of read­ing any more than before. There is no anal­o­gous improve­ment. In fact, tac­tu­ally speak­ing, read­ing on an e-reader is a less desir­able expe­ri­ence than hold­ing a book, and I can’t imag­ine read­ers shar­ing playlists of nov­els the way they share music.

Remem­ber that buy­ing books is a social activ­ity. Peo­ple browse, they hang out, they chat with oth­ers, and they drink cof­fee. This is what they do. Music buy­ers pop in head phones and block out the world.

There an good, valid uses for ebooks–textbooks, mag­a­zines, newspapers–but they are a par­al­lel mar­ket that doesn’t and won’t super­sede the book itself, which, as waste­ful as it is, is still the cheap­est long term way to put and keep books in the hands of readers.

So check back in ten years to see if I have to hand over that Golden Age comic or get to do a happy dance–that I hope won’t throw out my back.