Once upon a time a new technology cut the price of books by 90%, flooded the market with many times as many as before crowding out the real classics, and supposedly cut into the quality and care given each book.

Ebooks?

No, still just the Gutenberg and moveable type innovation.

The literate classes experienced exactly the kind of overload we feel today — suddenly, there were far more books than any single person could master, and no end in sight. Scholars, at first delighted with the new access to information, began to despair. “Is there anywhere on earth exempt from these swarms of new books?” asked Erasmus, the great humanist of the early 16th century.

[Boston globe]

And yet we still read. In fact most people can read in the Western world, even if they chose not to buy prose books all the time.
So the market is "flooded" with readable content;

296 newspapers in 2003. These account for a combined circulation of more than 3 million.

Wikip

Would the world suffer if there were fewer printed options?
Is online and digital a viable substitute? For news? prose? Poetry? Facts?

Apparently it might look like the politicians here in Norway will have to make some educated guesses along those lines - the main ruling party (labour, social democrat) is more or less pushing for sales tax to be applied to electronic books (but not printed) and the discussion is on for the future of media support (currently newspapers get no sales tax added, magazines do get the full 24%) in general and for digital in particular.

Fun times ahead. Might just need to look into an US or online based payment solution for my Kindle needs.