I predicted the future successfully once, but never get any credit for it!
Part of TidBITS' special appeal has been the accessibility of its writers - the email edition still includes email addresses for authors, and the new web-based comment system is intended to involve authors as well. Ten years ago, before Twitter existed or journalists routinely published email addresses (or even had public addresses), I had a sense that accessibility was going to be increasingly important to writers. Now that most reporters and novelists have Twitter feeds, blogs, & public email addresses, I feel vindicated but foolish for never mentioning my foresight to anyone else. Fortunately, I now see another trend in the making, in another area being pioneered by the TidBITS / Take Control folks: ebooks.
Point #1: The experience of reading electronically is improving very rapidly, and steadily growing more popular. I have been reading websites on my phone since 2003, when I got Plucker on my Treo 600. Today I routinely read books on my iPhone in Instapaper, BookShelf, Eucalyptus, & Kindle.app. I also have Classics, B&N eReader, and a few others. My father has an iPhone, but likes to read on his Kindle DX.
Many people feel strong attachments to paper books, and others say reading on an electronic gadget is an inferior experience. But our children and grandchildren will be more familiar with electronic gadgets such as cellphones than we are with paper books and magazines. And the 2009 DX, iPhone, and nook are all amazingly improved over the 6-year-old Treo 600. At that rate of evolution, in another dozen years I almost expect free ebook readers (subsidized just like cellphones, by cellular carriers and/or ebook vendors), which never need recharging or run out of space. But whatever the specifics, this technology is clearly going to keep improving rapidly. It's worth remembering that the Kindle & nook both run Linux, and the nook actually runs Android, which Google developed for cellular phones. That's a pretty strong hint of coming convergence - as are the component-level similarities between Kindles & nooks and cellphones - the differences are basically the screens and lack of microphones.
Point #2: Reading on paper is constrained by physical availability of reading materials, but the Internet has already solved this problem for ebooks. Ten years ago, almost everything people read came from bookstores, libraries, periodicals, or schools. Since then ordering books for 'mail-order' delivery has become commonplace, with Amazon as the 800-pound gorilla in this market. Debates about the long tail aside, we have much more choice in reading materials today than when I was a kid, mostly thanks to the Internet.
But what does it all mean? Now that there are so many gadgets and applications for reading ebooks, we likewise have myriad sources for the ebooks themselves. Amazon is easily the best known, with 350,000 Kindle ebooks available as of October 2009 (compared to the millions they sell on paper) but has plenty of competitors - with Barnes & Noble as their nemesis. But both Amazon and B&N are clearly carrying their existing business models over to ebooks. Selling bits is much cheaper than selling atoms drop (especially heavy hardcovers): gratification becomes instant and (relatively cheap) Internet bandwidth replaces shipping fees. This is a relatively simple and easy shift.
A larger change, however, originates with sites like Project Gutenberg, which offers about 30,000 free ebooks for download in a variety of formats. Several different ebook readers can access Gutenberg directly, although hardware vendors have focused on their own commercial storefronts. B&N's nook offers direct access to Google Books' half-million public-domain books. And various authors offer free downloads of their own ebooks. Currently there's no good way to search through such private downloads - the best option for now is to find an author's site and look for download links. The Internet Archive's BookServer project is intended to tie together a searchable network of ebooks, making it easier to find books from a wide variety of sources - whether free, for sale, or for loan. Google is determined to be a player in some or all these areas, although the details are not yet clear.
Choice and Economics -- With such a wealth of options for getting ebooks, there is a natural inclination towards free options. Free paper books are rare, but free ebooks are common. There is price competition for paper books, but it's floored by the cost of printing and shipping. Ebook prices vary much more widely. As copyrights expire (if Disney lets them), and as people publish more free content, the pool of available free ebooks grows inexorably.
Point #3: Price matters, and it's hard to compete with free. When deciding what book to read next, I am always aware of cost - will I read a free book, a (relatively expensive) Kindle book, or a cheaper non-Kindle book? Predictably, faced with those choices, I have been reading a lot of free books - both public domain (lapsed copyrights) and posted by the authors. I've also been reading a lot of non-Kindle books. The Kindle books I read are by authors I really like and unavailable from other sources. This is a big change - (paperback) novels all cost about the same, and none I'm aware are available for different prices, except trade vs. mass-market printings. For decades authors have been competing primarily with other authors in the same fields, at the same prices.
Today ebookstores are competing with free alternatives (although generally not for the same titles), and the free books are more usable! Kindle books cannot be loaned or given (some nook books can be loaned once - the rest never), and you cannot even copy a sentence or couplet out to email to a friend. Gutenberg books are easy to share and excerpt, as are titles from WebScription.net (Baen), because they don't use DRM.
And of course cost is always a consideration. Faced with two books I expect to like about the same (or, frequently, without any way to know which I'll enjoy more), my inclination is to read the free one, saving the purchased book for later. Faced with dozens of books to read and no particular preference, I tend to read the one I believe is 'better', which may be a popular classic, even if I don't know what it's really like yet.
Point #4: Ebookstore catalogs overlap with each other - Amazon & B&N need to carry New York Times bestsellers, or they might as well just go home. They also compete directly against each other on price, but much less against smaller vendors and less well-known ebooksellers, who lack the advantage of being integrated with Kindle & nook readers. But the free catalogs contain totally different books - mostly books which have passed out of copyright and into the public domain, and stuff written by Creative Commons authors. With payment as a disincentive and viable free alternatives, we readers have a strong incentive to rediscover older books.
I see this clearly in my own reading, as I have been trying ebook readers and different sources for ebooks. I find myself reading more older books, more public domain (lapsed copyright) books, and more current non-DRM books. In January & February, I read 7 books - all paperback. In March I started reading ebooks seriously, and my Goodreads history shows a dramatic shift. From March through December, I read 14 paperbacks, 15 Kindle ebooks which I paid for, 8 ebooks bought from other vendors, and 24 free ebooks (some from Amazon's Kindle store). Each time I finish a book and decide what to read next, I think of the tens of thousands of available free books - do I want to read one of them, or something that costs money?
Upshot -- I see a new kind of competition coming into play to current writers. Historically they competed with a small pool of active peers for limited bookshelf space and bookstore sales. More recently they competed with a much larger pool of books available from Amazon, B&N, and specialty booksellers. In the present and future, writers are and will be increasingly competing at a disadvantage against thousands of dead writers whose works have passed into the public domain, as well as all the folks who for various reasons make their work available for free via Creative Commons and other mechanisms. I doubt most current and aspiring writers have fully realized that their competition is going to inevitably get much stiffer, as they compete for sales with an ever-growing pool of (free and paid) content available on the Internet.
Coming full circle, the more forward-thinking among them are working to be more accessible and involve their audiences...