A big problem with this prediction of the imminent decline and fall of paper is that it seems to neglect the fact that paper is soooooooo cheap. Also comes with many affordances, sure, but it is so cheap. That makes it easy to use for one-off notes, and it makes it easy to use lots of pieces of paper at the same time. In contrast, although a laptop or tablet or smartphone is capable of holding many more documents than would be convenient to carry in a stack of papers, it has a hard time displaying them all at the same time as is nearly trivial with paper.

For instance: when giving certain sorts of exams (or other assignments), you want the students to be able to have a reference sheet (for notation, formulas, vocabulary, whatever) plus the sheet with the question/problem/assignment on it, plus the sheet they're actually writing their answer on. The same thing on even a large desktop screen will involve a moderate amount of window swapping (and, as a result, cognitive context-switching).

Even just for reading textbooks and technical material, only the larger desktop monitors come close to replicating the amount of real estate available in a two-page spread.

I think a lot of the technical issues are likely to be solved in a relatively short time, as the author suggests. But I'm pretty sure the incredible cheapness of paper (compared to anything electronic) will keep it in business for many years to come.