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But e-books won’t stay on the periphery of book publishing much longer. E-book hardware is on the verge of going mainstream. More dedicated e-readers are coming, with ever larger screens. So, too, are computer tablets that can serve as giant e-readers, and hardware that will not be very hard at all: a thin display flexible enough to roll up into a tube.

With the new devices in hand, will book buyers avert their eyes from the free copies only a few clicks away that have been uploaded without the copyright holder’s permission? Mindful of what happened to the music industry at a similar transitional juncture, book publishers are about to discover whether their industry is different enough to be spared a similarly dismal fate.

Total e-book sales, though up considerably this year, remained small, at $81.5 million, or 1.6 percent of total book sales through July.

Electronic “is going to be the center of the universe,” said Ms. Friedman, a flamboyant and relentless booster of authors during her four-decade career in New York publishing. “We really think that what we’re going to do is to help transform the industry, which is built on models that we all know are broken.”

Although she provided few specifics, Ms. Friedman said Open Road would use a new proprietary online marketing platform to promote backlist titles on blogs, Twitter and social networking sites.

Because many authors signed print contracts before the growing world of e-books was contemplated, many older works are not currently available in official e-book form. Ms. Friedman has secured a contract to publish Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” in an e-book edition and is negotiating with the estate of Michael Crichton for the e-book rights to several titles.

In the end, I was misled by the subtitle of the book, "The End of the World as We Know It," into hoping it offered a view of the future. Given the fact that I read the book in paper format, I should have known that this was a long shot. Our view of the future is constantly changing, and it is an unrealistic expectation to hope that a book author can make predictions that will a) stand up to the delay between idea formulation and publication and b) avoid being leaked and widely distributed on the web prior to publication.