“Tech pundits recently moved up the date for the death of the book, to sometime around 2015,” notes Christopher Mim, “inspired largely by the rapid adoption of the iPad and the success of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. But in their rush to christen a new era of media consumption, have the pundits overreached?”

In a smart — and blistering — commentary for Technology Review, Mim says that indeed they have. “I’m calling the peak of inflated expectations now. Get ready for the next phase of the hype cycle – the trough of disillusionment.”

According to Mim, “The signs of a hype bubble are all around us. Mostly in the form of irrational exuberance.” For example, he says,

In Clearwater, Florida, the principle of the local high school recently replaced all his students’ textbooks with latest-gen Kindles – without, apparently, any awareness that formal trials of the Kindle as a textbook replacement led universities like Princeton and Arizona State University to reject it as inadequate.

Then you have pundits like Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT’s Media Lab, making statements to the effect that the physical book is dead in 5 years. This is the kind of statement that, to be fair, has either been taken out of context or is demonstrably untrue, in as much as any prediction can be proved false before the future arrives.

And then there’s the animosity of tech commentators — “Many tech pundit wants books to die. Really.”

All of which could lead to the “trough of disillusionment” he mentioned:

The backlash against ebooks by those who aren’t so in love with technology for its own sake has yet to begin, but it’s coming. Ebooks are adequate for reading novels, but the makers of the Kno, (in)famous for being the world’s most gigantic ebook, believe that their technology is the only way to replace the specialized class of books we rely on for our education — textbooks. If they’re right, the experiment in Clearwater, Florida is bound to run into problems.

And as for the death-by-2015 predictions of Negroponte, it’s just as likely that as the ranks of the early adopters get saturated, adoption of ebooks will slow. The reason is simple: unlike the move from CDs to MP3s, there is no easy way to convert our existing stock of books to e-readers. And unlike the move from records and tapes to CDs, it’s not immediately clear that an ebook is in all respects better than what it succeeds.

So the world is left with an unconvertible stock of used books that is vast. If the bustling, recession-inspired trade in used books tells us anything, it’s that old books hold value for readers in a way that not even movies and music do. That’s value that no ebook reader can unlock.