Remember CDs? I don’t think I have bought one since 2001, and now that I have an iPhone, iPod, iTunes, there’s no need to ever buy a CD again. One could argue there’s not much need to buy music either, since I spend more time listening online to Pandora or Blip.fm anyways.

So what will happen to books? I wonder if the publishing industry will meet the same fate as the music industry. I still buy printed books — but many people I know have switched over to the Kindle, and Kindle readers buy two to three times as many books as book readers. Or they’re just ditching books altogether and getting their reading from blogs and online magazines and news sites.

Working on the LWM social media team has been interesting because we’re essentially trying to use social media to promote and sell more copies of a print book, which is an interesting concept when you think about it. It’s harder to get people’s attention for a book when people are too busy to read any more and prefer to get their news and information in 30-second bits rather than long-form reporting and writing. And we’re trying to use social media, the very thing that’s contributing to the decline of longer-form writing and journalism, to do that.

So my question is: what will happen to books? Do you still buy books? Will actual hard copy books go the way of the CD?