Will Paperback Books Disappear Over the Next 50 Years? (Essay Sample)

Will Paperback Books Disappear Over the Next 50 Years? Student’s Name Institutional Affiliation Course Number and Name Instructor’s Name Due Date Will Paperback Books Disappear Over the Next 50 Years? The utilization of e-books is fast gaining momentum among scholars, a development that vastly threatens the relevance of paperback books. Most individuals presently use digital mediums like smartphones and computers to access reading materials. Consequently, the sustainability of softcover books has become a continuous issue. Opponents of the paperback books disappearance notion assert that these information sources will remain crucial knowledge “stores” despite the rapid digitalization of reading materials due to their melancholic appeal and engagingness. However, the disappearance of paperback books is inevitable. E-books are appealing information sources, considering their accessibility, flexibility, and ease of reading than softcover books; thus, the latter will be shunned as knowledge sources half a century from now. Paperback books will become obsolete in the next five decades. Softcover books are increasingly becoming inconvenient and expensive knowledge sources. With smartphones’, tablets’, and computers’ popularity fast augmenting, especially among millennials, individuals can now conveniently and inexpensively buy e-books. Reading enthusiasts no longer have to incur high costs to access books or to travel long distances to visit traditional bookstores only to find the novels or journal articles they require sold out. Likewise, e-books provide knowledge seekers with invaluable opportunities to store numerous reading materials in small spaces that are easy to carry, like flash disks (Casselden, & Pears, 2020). Moreover, e-books offer more personalized reading experiences than paperback books. For instance, enlarging file fonts, adjusting brightness, and typeset controls are some of the features that will ultimately incentivize the replacement of paperback books with e-books. Conversely, paperback books will remain relevant but through more refined formats. Through new formats, paperback books will retain their aesthetic value among readers, thereby averting their disappearance in the future (Nuwer, 2016). Even devoid of the formally explicated innovations, paperback books still offer gamuts of advantages to readers. They also eliminate various limitations, like the inability to highlight vital excerpts and make notes on page edges or the loss of content due to crashed hard discs or hacking associated with their perceived replacements, e-books. Consequently, individuals will still prefer softcover books to e-books five decades from now. According to Zapo (2014), the utilization of e-books as information sources may significantly lower reading experiences due to distractions, for instance, from the incoming mails, videos, and pop-up advertisements. Such interruptions affect comprehension, reading speed, and people's data contextualization accuracy, consequently underpinning the importance of paperback books as invaluable information sources among scholars. Nonetheless, most rationales presented to justify the continued employment of softcover books, particularly in the next five decades, are inherently untenable. Modern e-book formats allow readers to enjoy certain paperback book-centric privileges like highlighting the points deemed important and scribbling notes on pages’ edges (Nuwer, 2016). Furthermore, most issues perceived as inhibitors of the advent of the “e-book age” can easily be circumvented. For instance, distractions caused by pop-up advertisements can be efficaciously minimized through customized computer settings like restricting targeted advertisements and blocking spam emails. Thus, e-books wil...