Negroponte is best known as the founder and Chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, and is the founder of the One Laptop per Child Association (OLPC). At the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA earlier this month, he made his startling prediction. Here's an excerpt from TechCrunch's coverage:
The physical book is dead, according to Negroponte. He said he realizes that’s going to be hard for a lot of people to accept. But you just have to think about film and music. In the 1980s, the writing was on the wall that physical film was going to die, even though companies like Kodak were in denial. He then asked people to think about their youth with music. It was all physical then. Now everything has changed.
By “dead,” he of course doesn’t mean completely dead. But he means that digital books are going to replace physical books as the dominant form.