I sort of see it more or less like this, but it'll be about 50 -50 between physical and e-books.
I don't see anything ruling things one way or the other as different things for different folks.
For the rest of the 21st century maybe - if they're lucky. After that - or probably before - the way I see it is the world - well the First World and a good portion of the Second World anyway - will have two kinds of buildings: mass residences and mass warehouses.
If Netflix and Safeway Premium Delivery and the like is any example, all the malls and big box stores etc will become the equivalent of an online version of Costco, but with no ``customers'' permitted on the premises.
Sort of like an extreme version of how supermarkets started off with in the first place back in the teens a hundred years ago - when customers came up to the counter, placed their order, waited for staff to fill it, bag it, charge you for it and then helped you with it out to the trolley which stopped out front.
But, now with the Internet, you don't even have to show up to place - or collect - your order nevermind showing up to pay for it. And the trend of nobody wanting to interact with anybody will just get bigger and bigger and bigger until nobody wants to interact with anybody - if they're paid to or not.
And housekeeping companies and gardening companies and business-affairs management companies (see my note about that in another thread) and transportation companies and just on and on and on.
Same with invitation-only cooking-kitchen companies that are all the rage now in San Francisco. You bring your own food - or in the newest incarnations up in the tony North Beach areas - order it online from organic markets with tie-ins and cross-promotion agreements and have it delivered to the ``restaurant'' - the staff cooks it and all you do for probably a fourth of the price of a regular restaurant meal, is show up with four or six or eight of your friends, ``eat out'' at the ``restaurant'', have nothing to clean up after and then go on about your business unencumbered. Then with that, you don't even have to have a kitchen, living room or bar in your house.
I say long before a hundred years goes by not only will nobody be doing any of their own shopping anymore, laundry companies will expand and drop their prices sufficiently to where nevermind the average middle-class household can afford it, blue-collar and underclass people will also be able to afford it...
There is still a Tower records store in Japan.
...people will be sleeping in Japanese-style cubicles about as big as a double-wide casket and, apart from sleeping and eating, their whole lives will be spent at telecommuting centers programming their avatars to virtually interact with other people who are also programming their avatars, the whole world will end up as a version of Second Life and Everybody will live Happily Ever After.
Right?
I totally see America, Europe, Australia, etc. becoming like a new version of New York City around the turn of the 20th Century, just like that old short story we all read in middle school about there being only two kinds of people - ultra smart people that can't go anywhere, do anything or even move by themselves and live their lives in little glass globes connected to each other - and the vastly inferior caretakers thereof.
After all, with the new population explosion coming around again, SOMEBODY is going to have to hire all these people once they get old enough to work. And, contrary to popular opinion - talking about outdated business models - everybody cannot be working in either Initial Public Contact, Foodservice or Custodial occupations forever like they are now.
Homeless people smell and you don't want `em in your business because of it? They got roach coaches, they can have laundry and shower coaches. Come up with offshoots of companies that right now specialize in ``greasers'' clothing from construction workers that have sense enough to isolate those machines from household laundry machines at the laundromat and come up with companies that take shower and laundry facilities around to skid row.
And their behavior is such that they can't get jobs because they can't be civil to customers or management? We can solve that, too. Get `em jobs in all these warehouses with no customer access that are going to be replacing all the stores where no management shows up - just like Union jobs were for immigrants in the 1930's.
But that'd come about only because of the new civil rights and legal affairs people taking up their cause after having nothing to do after all the other oppressed populations get their due, like March of Dimes went on to birth defects after there was no more polio.
Then they can isolate themselves from everybody and everything - conduct their entire lives online and be just like everybody else in what will by then be passing for Modern Society.
Downloads didn't kill it off. High rents, huge spaces, and a business model that was no longer plausible in the US killed it off along with Virgin and HMV.
Or plausible in the rest of the First World as well as a large portion of the Second World (Russia, Turkey, etc).
But as long as there's a UC-Berkeley, Amoeba and Rasputin will operate there on Telegraph.
Or a Green Onions next to U of Penn in Philly or Mayhem Music next to UCLA or Princeton Music Exchange next to Princeton or Cambridge Music Mart down in the Village from Harvard, etc, etc, etc.
And the same holds true for bookshops with real books, food cafes with real food being served by real people to real customers and every other marketing concept we hold dear that's leftover from the 20th Century. But, we got over leisure suits and platform shoes, so...
Other than that, I stand by my original observation talking about the larger world
i.e the evolution of modern culture outside of University City USA.
(singing)
By the year 2125 -
All the stores have turned into a dive
All the people are livin' in hives.....
