In essence, it is common today to predict that, in the future, no one will buy printed items, such as books or newspapers, due to the fact that all the necessary information will be available online for free. Personally, I rather disagree with this statement because it is way too radical to consider that all traditional sources of information can be replaced by gadgets completely.
First and foremost, it must be acknowledged that printed materials generally provide more reliable information. Not all websites contain reputable data that can genuinely assist individuals. Additionally, such a transition will undoubtedly impact on the unemployment rates as millions of people working in this wide sphere will lose their jobs. At present, the whole industry of book production, as well as the production of newspapers, still appears to be profitable and growing. Should people cease reading and, therefore, manufacturing printed items completely, it may lead to a lot of turbulent transformations and financial crises. Hence, one may contend that such radical changes are unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future.
On the other hand, nowadays, the prices of books seem to be significantly higher compared to the previous years, while most of the websites are free and give everyone the opportunity to access almost any information within a few clicks. Moreover, today, a great number of various scientific articles that one requires for studies or work can be found on the internet, easily, quickly and for free, or at a very low price. In contrast, when it comes to a printed version of scientific papers or materials, one needs at least a few books and journals to compare different sources and data, which appears to be fairly expensive. Therefore, because of technologies and electronics, the world has already changed a lot, since, now, we can use even one website where we can verify the information that we have found. Using cutting-edge devices gives more opportunities to develop the quality of our work or simply find an answer to important questions. Thus, gadgets have indeed started pushing out printed means of sharing information and might, theoretically, substitute them entirely one day.
To sum up, I believe that, although our digital world will continue developing so much that printed items will not have such importance as at present, there will still be a certain group of individuals that will prefer to use paper books and newspapers anyway; the complete disappearance of printed products is rather very improbable in the near future.