Books + Digital CopyFollow

Do you think publishers will go the route of the BluRay/DVD sellers and eventually sell hard copy books with a digital copy for your reader device?

Hard to say. Right now, they still view the content as separate purchases with equal profit potential. I think the book industry, like the rest of the entertainment industry, still believes each purchase is buying a separate but distinct right to use, rather than buying the the content itself, regardless of media format.

I have been saying this should happen since ebooks were... invented? Or whatever.

It makes sense to me.

I don't think most will ever do combined purchases like that, it would be nice, but unlikely I think as there's pretty little incentive at the moment.

I think it's a bit different than the film/music markets which are going down that route because they suffer so much from digital piracy, and digital piracy exists partly because we want the freedom to move our media around our devices. While book piracy does certainly exists (usually in the form of downloadable PDFs or text files), reading for the mainstream is still more comfortable on paper.

I have a Kindle, and while it was very comfortable to actually read the text (I get headaches from reading longform text on backlit screens), it wasn't very convenient to navigate or make notes/bookmarks etc. Books/text on the whole is so much more a physical medium, while music and video is pretty much for non-interactive consumption and the only thing that really changes is the screen size/type.