The current issue of the New York Review of Books has a thoughtful essay by Sue Halpern, The iPad Revolution, about the implications of the iPad and other electronic devices for books and publishing. Halpern reminds us that techno-prophets have for some time been predicting the end of books and the end of reading, yet despite the recession publishing is a big business and there's a lot of reading going on. You only have to look at the popularity of book clubs to appreciate that.

There's much about the e-revolution in publishing that's hard to predict. Will Apple's 'agency' pricing model prevail? What will happen in the Kindle vs iPad battle given that Amazon is pricing e-books as loss leaders currently (at least given the present deal with publishers) and – as Robert McCrum writes in an article on the Apple-Amazon-Google contest in today's Observer, showing real publishing ambitions?

It strikes me, though, that some questions aren't even being asked. There's a presumption often made, and often wrong, that a new technology for doing something replaces the old technology. Everybody thinks of the example of music media where this is largely true, with CDs killing cassettes and now being threatened with extinction by downloads. However, in many cases, people use both old and new technologies for a very long period. Are physical and e-books substitutes or complements? Will people combine the convenience of e-books for commuting with the physical, tactile and visual, pleasure of a beautiful artefact?

And what about the implications for publishing and bookselling? Much of the comment focuses on the titans. The big bookstore chains have been suffering, but there are at least in very big cities signs of a revival in small bookstores – such as the wonderful Daunts and London Review Bookshop in London – and many committed independents in market towns. Reading isn't only a solitary pleasure, but also a social one, and small bookstores can use the social links they create and events to attract customers.

As for publishers, the big beasts are massive oligopolists – yet another industry where competition authorities on both sides of the Atlantic have failed to prevent merger after merger – but I spy signs that independent presses are starting to use the new technologies – print on demand, internet retailing – to get their titles to much bigger markets than used to be possible. I just ordered Richard Mabey's classic The Unofficial Countryside from Dovecote Press in Dorset. It was founded in 1974 and has a list of 200 titles. Judging from the review pages, there are perhaps more of them starting up, and they have certainly become more prominent.