What's In Store For Books

It's impossible to ignore the decline of the paper book, what with the introduction of easily-accessed virtual copies of nearly every book to have ever been written and the constant increase in prevalence of portable e-readers.  Books will probably be printed less and less as time goes on; eventually there will be no use or need for physical copies of books, made entirely of resources that humanity has become more and more worried about losing.  Eventually, every physical book will be an antique and the book market will become populated entirely by collectors and individuals stuck in the past. People will stop printing books for the same reason that people have stopped widely using scrolls -- it's simply not practical anymore.

If there's anything we learned in this course though, it's that the medium and appearance of the book is not what makes the creation a book.  It is the idea, the permanence of the story, the exchange between reader and writer, that makes a book a book.  So, even though paper will soon be out of date, books will continue indefinitely.  There's no end to people willing to share their thoughts, and there's no end to people that are willing to absorb the ideas of others.  As long as that remains true, the future of books has no end.