In the constantly-changing modern world, there are times where we all just want to step back, relax, and enjoy reading a good book that takes you to another world. One where you can forget all your issues, decisions, and other important matter and focus on the life within the book.
In recent years this old-fashioned, calming, and simple practice has been changing. More and more people are no longer reading a book when they want to get away from our modern world and the technology that comes along with it: instead, they are using technology to read a book. But is this good or bad?
One argument is that e-books are the future, and that within fifty years children will not even know of paper books, except potentially ancient texts such as early editions of religious books (e.g. The Bible, The Torah, The Qur’an, etc.) or very famous series’ (e.g. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc.). The main reason for this is price and convenience. At least at the moment, all books on devices such as the Kindle are much cheaper than paper copies, as there are no costs in producing the book, as well as the devices themselves being available for under £50. Not only this, but a small device the same size but thinner and lighter than one book can hold more books than the average library (Amazon does not specify, but says its Kindles can hold ‘thousands’ of books).
The final, more environmental, argument is that e-books will have to be used in the future, as the millions of paper books produced per year (a little over 130,000,000 million books have every been produced in history) use up a lot of paper, which in turn uses up a lot of trees, and deforestation is, of course, not something we want to increase. Nearly 4,000,000,000 trees are cut down each year for the production of paper (35% of all trees cut down annually) and a relatively large percentage of that is for books specifically. In the US alone, over 30,000,000 trees are cut down annually for the production of books, and so to move entirely to e-books would significantly impact upon the effort to reduce deforestation.
The other side of the spectrum is that e-books will never replace books, and will either soon die out as possible negative health impacts are discovered, or, slightly towards the middle of the argument, that both types of books will have a place in the market in the future. A study done in Norway in 2013 showed that year 9 pupils who read from paper books scored significantly higher on reading comprehensions than those who used e-books, potentially because not only is it harder to refer back to pages in an e-book (as you cannot as easily flick through pages), but also because acts such as turning a physical page work as memory markers. Although different studies show different results, very few are in favour of the e-book outright, yet a relatively large percentage of studies show little difference in academic performance. Another reason that people do not believe that e-books will exist in the future is the potential health risk of looking at a screen (especially at night when lot of people do their reading).
In conclusion I believe that there are ups and downs to both the standard paper books and the new e-books, and neither one has enough benefits over the other to completely eradicate one of the two forms. Over time, therefore, I believe that the increase in e-books will ease off and there will become a balance between both kinds of books.
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