The Future is already here

Regarding last night's debate about the future of books, here's a few links and thoughts.

Small Beer Press has a bunch of their works as CC licensed free downloads, including:
Kelly Link, "Magic for Beginners" and "Stranger Things Happen"
Benjamin Rosenbaum, "The Ant King and Other Stories"
Maureen F. McHugh, "Mothers & Other Monsters"
John Kessel, "The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories"

Tor's new site has been featuring not only regular short stories (by Steven Gould, Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross among others), but also free ebooks, like Emma Bull's classic "War for the Oaks".
Initially in the launch campaign for the new site they featured a book a week for a limited time, sadly these titles are no longer available.

Cory Doctorow has several of his books available as CC downloads in his website Craphound, interestingly enough are the fan-made versions of each title and which even include translations

Lilith Saintcrow made her novel Selene entirely available as a serial updated on Monday, Thursdays and Fridays (which today will be concluded with the Prologue)

The wonderful website DailyLit which allows you to turn a lot of free books (and some paid) into your very own personal serial, allowing you to specify the frequency to suit you reading speed, it works by e-mail and RSS feeds.

My fellow blogger over at The Literary Pursuit once actually bothered herself with posting a Free ebooks Directory

Now this is not the whole spectrum of what's available online, heck it's just a tiny drop in a vast ocean, this is what i can pull off the top of my head.
And I don't think the discussion is whether ebooks will ever replace books, which they won't. A physical book's value will always outweigh the electronic form, in fact i believe that libraries will feel the most threatened by these new technologies, although there will always be a need for libraries.
Ebooks are here and they are indeed the future.
Books will never cease to exist, because the object itself has as much value as the contents and often times even more, in fact i compare them to watches (we don't really need to have watches on us anymore, cellphones have watches, and yet we use them, carry them, collect them, and i don't see Swatch lowering their prices).