There was a time when the most important thing a man owned was his horse. There was a time when it was a graver offense to steal a horse than to kill a man. Then along came the automobile, belching smoke upon the world, demanding the paving of peaceful country lanes, creating endless traffic snarls and sprawling suburbs.

Have we lost this idyllic past, when men and their beasts were closer companions than brothers or best friends? Did Henry Ford consider what would happen to the horses as he built his first automobile factory? Surely there must have been those who felt the horse would never be replaced. After all, cars were unreliable, and often became stuck in the mud. How could you travel far, when the car was reliant on gasoline? A horse needed only a field of grass for fuel. Cars were much more expensive than horses, and not nearly as good company.

This is functionally the same question Ben Vershbow poses at Future of the Book.

A library encompasses architecture, other people, temptations, distractions, whispers, touch. If the Google library is nothing more than a dynamic book locator, then it will have fallen terribly short of its immense potential to bring these afore-mentioned qualities into virtual space. Inside-the-book browsing is a sad echo of actual tactile browsing in a brick-and-mortar library.

This is like saying that driving a car down a highway is a “sad echo” of riding a horse down a country lane. It might be true, but I’m not going to trade in my Ford Mustang for the four-legged variety. When I want to commune with nature, I drive my car up to the mountains and take a walk.

Horses have not disappeared from our society. There are fanatical horse breeders and riders. Children (ironically, mostly girls) still want ponies for Christmas. Horse racing, though waning in popularity, remains a fascination for many.

At some point in the future, we will be able to say the same thing about paper books. Libraries will become the stables of the future, with their familiar smells and sounds. Many people will be dedicated to the preservation of old books, and new books will continue to be made. People will spend millions, perhaps even billions of dollars on books. But compared to the role books once played in our lives, they will have only a marginal influence.

Will there be a digital version of the library, with free, open access to the information we can now glimpse only a few pages at a time in services like Google Print? The question is as absurd as asking whether a car is a mechanical version of a horse. We will use digital resources for some of the purposes we used to use libraries for, but not all of them. A computer will never be a quiet, inspiring place to study. There will be a price for the convenience of having the world’s store of knowledge at your fingertips.

Personally I believe scholars will eventually recoil from the restrictions of copyright, and most scholarly works will be published with an open-source model, like the Public Library of Science. After all, copyright doesn’t benefit scholars, who want their work distributed as widely as possible as long as their names remain attached to it.

Many others will also prefer wide distribution of their work to the long-shot of a payday from commercial publication. So some, possibly even most knowledge will be freely available to all. The rest will have some sort of price tag. The big question is, how much will we be required to pay?