It seems clear that the once staid publishing industry is in the midst of a revolution. As in any revolution, casualties are inevitable. It's likely that some of the new e-publishers may not survive. Similarly, it may be that some of the dinosaurs of print will go extinct, if they do not adapt to the changing digital environment. Perhaps the most difficult problem e-publishers will face is finding a way to make money selling fiction on the net.
Information wants to be free, or so they say.
And if it isn't free, any number of netizens are willing to find ways to set it free. Hackers and data pirates have some print publishers scared silly. But in a matter of minutes you can burn the complete works of Shakespeare onto a CD-ROM or send it through your broadband connection to Osaka, Oslo, and Oshkosh. Writers too will face challenges. A publisher of ebooks has no need of a warehouse or a distribution system that deals with moving atoms from here to there.