Once upon a time, bookstores were made of bricks and mortar, books came from pulverized trees, and this blog post, if it existed, would have appeared in a newsletter delivered to your mailbox. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? The music industry similarly thought along these lines before the term “mp3” entered popular use. For more than a decade, we’ve lived in the digital and online worlds of e-stores, e-newsletters, and now more popularly, e-books.

At the Digital Book World Conference last week, Yale University Press Director John Donatich reflected on the way the publishing industry has transformed over the last several decades. Yet Donatich argued that, in spite of the vast possibilities of digitization, “the book as a kind of intellectual enterprise is not going away.”

Watch the video to hear Donatich’s comments, and learn what several other publishing professionals think about the future of the page—printed or otherwise.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zrpuw1mfxpk]