Nicholas Negroponte? M. G. Siegler? William Deresiewicz? Apocryphal?
Question for Quote Investigator: Predicting the technological future is extremely difficult. More than a decade ago Nicholas Negroponte, the head of the MIT Media Lab, predicted that books would not exist in about five years. He meant that the popularity of paper books would decline, and ebooks would predominate globally. Would you please help me to find a citation?
Reply from Quote Investigator: In August 2010 Nicholas Negroponte participated in a panel titled “What Technology Wants vs. What People Want” at the Techonomy conference. Negroponte made a provocative prediction about the future of books. Boldface added to excerpts by QI:1
Can I give you an example of a technological inevitability that most people are appalled by, and that is that books will not exist in about five years.
Negroponte was not claiming that paper books would disappear. He believed that paper books would survive, but they would be eclipsed by digital books. He said:
As a luxury medium in the developed world, the same way we go to opera, and so on, physical books will survive, and they’ll have a long life.
Negroponte argued that numerous digital books could be stored on inexpensive laptop computers and shipped around the world. Thus, the economic efficiency of digital books was superior:
… when we ship one of these (laptops) into a village it has a hundred books in it. Then when we ship a hundred of them into a village what people don’t realize is that they each have a hundred different books. So that’s ten thousand books in that village. You and I didn’t have ten thousand books when we went to primary school.
Negroponte also presented an analogy between the paper format of books and the film format of photographs:
In the same way that film back in the late 80s was inevitably going to go away … we can predict that books will do the same …
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
In August 2010 writer and investor M. G. Siegler reported on the prediction about paper books in an article titled “Nicholas Negroponte: The Physical Book Is Dead In 5 Years” at the “TechCrunch” website:2
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.
In 2020 literary critic and essayist William Deresiewicz published “The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech”. Deresiewicz mentioned the comment by Negroponte:3
Tech evangelism, in the arts as in everything else, floats a million miles above reality. So sure is it of what must be true—still more, of what will be true—that it doesn’t bother finding out what actually is. No wonder it’s forever issuing supremely confident predictions that turned out to be supremely wrong. … In 2010, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, declared that the physical book would be dead, or at least obsolescent, within five years.
There has been a shift in reading formats during recent decades, but paper books have endured. In 2021 Pew Research asked U.S. adults about their consumption of books.4 Overall, 75% of U.S. adults stated that they had read a book in the past 12 months in any format, whether completely or part way through. Print books remained the most popular format with 65% of adults saying they had read a print book; 30% read an ebook; and 23% listened to an audiobook. The sum was not 100% because some readers use multiple formats.
In conclusion, Nicholas Negroponte did state in 2010 that “books will not exist in about five years”. Negroponte’s remark was about paper books. Ebooks have grown in popularity, but paper books continue to prevail today.
Acknowledgement: Great thanks to the anonymous person whose inquiry led QI to formulate this question and perform this exploration.
Image Notes: Picture of a group of books from Ed Robertson at Unsplash. The image has been cropped and resized.
- YouTube video, Title: Techonomy 2010: WHAT TECHNOLOGY WANTS VS. WHAT PEOPLE WANT (Part 2 of 3), Panel Title: What Technology Wants vs. What People Want, Participants: Bill Joy, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants, Nicholas Negroponte, One Laptop per Child Foundation, Willie Smits, Masarang Foundation, Panel Moderator: Maria Bartiromo, CNBC, (The Techonomy 2010 Conference was held in August 2010), Uploaded on: October 29, 2010, Uploaded by: techonomyllc, (Quotation from Nicholas Negroponte starts at 10 minutes 6 seconds of 12 minutes 45 seconds) (Accessed on youtube.com on August 8, 2025) link ↩︎
- Website: TechCrunch, Article title: Nicholas Negroponte: The Physical Book Is Dead In 5 Years, Article author: M.G. Siegler, Date on website: August 6, 2010, Website description: News about technology companies. (Accessed techcrunch.com on August 8. 2025) link ↩︎
- 2022 (2020 Copyright), The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech by William Deresiewicz, Chapter 3: Never-Been-a-Better-Time (The Techno-Utopian Narrative), Quote Page 29, A Holt Paperback: Henry Holt and Company, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- Website: Pew Research Center, Article title: Three-in-ten Americans now read e-books, Article author: Michelle Faverio and Andrew Perrin, Date on website: January 6, 2022, Website description: U.S. think tank based in Washington, D.C. which provides information about public opinion polling, demographic trends, and more. (Accessed pewresearch.org on August 8, 2025) link ↩︎