Books as art: the future of publishing?

I've made the books=vinyl, e-reader=mp3-player analogy before but it seemed to work so I'll use it again: vinyl didn't die out because of cassettes, or CDs, mini-discs or digital music collections. Books won't die out.

OneMonkey raised an interesting question recently though: will they become pieces of art? If you can get the content of a novel electronically in a convenient form that many people have embraced, what will be the added value of owning the physical book? Aside from personal preferences on holding paper and turning real pages that smell of childhood memories, what? It's the cachet, the exclusivity can be marketed but only if it is exclusive by some measure of the word.

Limited edition signed copies. Hand-written title pages, individual artwork, fine bindings. What if someone owned the original? What if by owning the original you could stop anyone else from being able to read it (like if you bought a watercolour from a commercial gallery and with it the rights to prints). Then you could charge for viewing; stately homes could charge the public to come and read in their library as well as see their Van Dyck's in the long gallery. Writers could be commissioned by the wealthy.

Books can be art but they also contain ideas and I'd worry about anything that blocks the flow of that. But to stretch another analogy, I'd be much happier about a few rich collectors owning originals if it facilitated the sale of a load of cheap postcards, allowing art into every home.