With the rise of modern technology more and more people are convinced that books will lose their relevance as a source of entertainment and information. I both agree and disagree with that sentiment. I will express my opinion below, alas, it should be noted that I don’t know any statistics, and therefore my position on this issue is highly hypothetical and biased.
I believe that in books as a source of information are disappearing into past, which to an extent is a good thing. Books containing information on certain topic, specifically a scientific topic tend to become outdated very quickly. In modern science new discoveries are being made every other week all around the globe. Such an amount of information is rather hard to keep track of, much less print it on paper. Internet allowes a faster access to information. Books also tend to have a surface level information on any given topic. For example, if I develop a sudden interest in sailing, I can easily Google a list of nautical terms; find sailors talking about their experiences, easily picking up new terms; or, if I grow especially desperate, I could contact a marine and ask them about their work. A regular dictionary won’t have any specialized words as they aren’t likely to be needed by an average person. This argument convinces me that books as a source of information are inferior to modern technologies.
However when it comes to entertainment I cannot disagree more. Humankind always loved stories and we are unlikely to ever stop. And as expected we developed different methods of conveying those stories to our audience, each of them has their own advantages and disadvantages. Movies allow us to view the journey of the hero from an omniscient point of view, with visual cues guiding us. However books allow the writer to get into the head of the narrator, in a way movies cannot. This convinces me that written stories will never go. And for a lot of people the ability to touch the book, to feel it’s pages or smell it became synonymous with a good evening. So I don’t believe that people will ever stop reading books.
Overall, I don’t believe that there is a possibility that books can be ever truly gone. Even though there’re good reasons to ditch books as a source of information, readers romanticise being able to read books, hold them in your hands, turn their pages way too much for books to disappear.