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 <a href="http://s551.photobucket.com/albums/ii468/yannisl/?action=view&#38;current=Palimsest1.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://s551.photobucket.com/albums/ii468/yannisl/?action=vie...</a> ,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!