Paywalls like that won't exist in the future but it will be a hard battle to get there. Publishers are steadfast in their ways and, for a variety of reasons, don't see the urgency of restructuring the way they do things. This is a quote from The Everything Store on how Bezos handled moving Amazon from selling traditional books to ebooks. It sheds light on why companies have a hard time shifting:

By that time, Bezos and his executives had devoured and raptly discussed another book that would significantly affect the company’s strategy: The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements.

Sears, for example, failed to move from department stores to discount retailing; IBM couldn’t shift from mainframe to minicomputers. The companies that solved the innovator’s dilemma, Christensen wrote, succeeded when they “set up autonomous organizations charged with building new and independent businesses around the disruptive technology.”

Drawing lessons directly from the book, Bezos unshackled Kessel from Amazon’s traditional media organization. “Your job is to kill your own business,” he told him. “I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.”

Even though it is obvious that the world was transitioning to more digital mediums, this transition would do harm to their existing business model: selling physical books. Even though it was obvious after music piracy and introduction of iTunes/iPod that every business was shifting to digital, companies have a hard time doing something that might harm their existing business model.

It isn't simply that they don't realize this or are too out of touch. It's that moving to these new markets is a risk and will do a ton of damage to how they currently make money. From the outside we say: these paywalls won't survive. From the inside they say: if we take down the paywall, how will we make money. Bezos and Amazon won the ebook transition because Bezos saw that even though it would do damage in the short term, it would be the only way to win in the long term.