We have heard all of this before. With cdroms, interactive television, and the World Wide Web supposedly supplanting books. Perhaps the sea change has come, but that change is too late for me. I prefer the immersive quality of hundreds of pages of linear text from a single author.
I can't possibly agree. The lack of visuals is one of the greatest selling points of books, for me. I get to do the imagining. My vision of the story is not constrained by what some director could imagine. Books with images are inherently inferior to books without images.
And graphic novels have had a hard time breaking into bookstores for just this reason—most people treat them as "an inferior version of a book," when they're really an entirely different medium, like a film is to a play. e-Readers will be the greatest boon to graphic-novel distribution since their invention, I think. That says nothing either way about books, though. :)