Overpriced, Dusty Chunks of Pulverised Rainforest: An Endangered Species
I have an interview on Wednesday for a 'proper' job at a bookshop in Wexford city centre.

Thing is, after working in HMV a couple of years back I sort of promised myself I wouldn't go back into retail. And yet here I am sending CVs off to exactly those jobs. The money would be nice but not essential right now, the commute is a pain, I loathe having to work with 'people'. Thing is, once I get into an interview I usually have no problem talking my way into the job (so let's hope that jinxes it).

What if they ask me how I see my future in the company? Should I tell them the truth? That the publishing industry is about to face the biggest and most dramatic shake-up in it's entire history and that there is not a single employee that can be certain they'll still have a job at any level of publishing five years from now?

And what, you ask, could possibly result in such a radical change?

This unassuming little piece of plastic is Fujitsu's new Film Substrate-based ePaper technology, a flexible flicker-free colour display that can show text and images using minuscule amounts of power and can even be updated wirelessly. Unlike other portable display systems you could read this in bed or on the bus without having to grow whole sets of interesting new muscles. Once this is combined with reasonable storage technology you'll be able to bring your entire library everywhere you go, just as people are now doing with their music. Lets face it, the only reason this hasn’t happened already is the discomfort caused by reading glowing, flickering displays we've been stuck with so far.

Why would anyone want to visit some vast characterless bookshop that, despite its size, may not even have the overpriced, dusty chunk of pulverised rainforest you're after when all you have to do log in to Amazon and download it in seconds? It's not just dead tree books that are about to disappear, newspapers and magazines may be the first casualties. Why would you carry around an awkward, mucky collection of yesterday's news when you can get up-to-the minute headlines simply by walking through a WiFi hotspot? Newsagents are going to become sweet shops, bookstores will be little more than novelty gift shops.

Over the next decade, with this technology, the bulk of the book selling business could be reduced to a few hundred individuals spread out across the country. In fact the largest group among them may be the proof-readers who'll be working overtime to get through the explosion of material that the publishes can now sell at low prices, with massive profits and virtually no risk. The rest will be specialists, printing books of art plates and a few, suddenly very expensive, things for the dead tree die-hards.

Fears over the total failure of DRM to impact piracy seems to be the only thing that will dissuade the industry from making this shift. But here's the thing, when the last Harry Potter book was published, without an eBook form, it took a matter of mere hours for someone to scan, OCR, proof-read and post an illicit eBook version online. You see, if the publishing industry doesn't wise up and own this technology, the technology will end up owning them.

Safe to say, my five-year-plan does not include working in a bookshop for very long.

What do you think? Should I even bother?