Technology is taking over. It seems that less of the past is being brought through to new generations, occasionally there will be a revival of something acceptable in the '80s (like record players or mom jeans) and Generation Z will admire it for a couple of months, take a few selfies with it, caption their pics "Got that vintage vibe" or "retro-loving" and then move on to the next big trend and forget all about their diamonds from the past. But surely paperbacks would never go out of fashion? 

It's only early days for e-books, although they were invented in 1971 with the launch of project Gutenberg, it wasn't until 1993 that a marketplace was established for the buying and selling of e-books. There's time for e-books to develop and with the ongoing addiction to technology, society might disband the need for paperback books within a decade or so.  Nevertheless, current statistics show that society is trying to hold onto good old fashioned paperbacks as the purchase of e-books declined in 2016 dramatically, with reasonable cause some might say because paperback books act as a detachment from society and technology. With the turn of a page you're removed from you're day to day life and instead connected with the adventure of your book. Paperbacks act as a respite to the ongoing blue light that seems to constantly shine through your screen, they act as motivation to go out a browse at a bookshop instead of browsing on your computer at home and so we cling onto them.

However, the introduction of Kindle by Amazon in 2007 led to an increase in the purchase of e-books which opened up the possibility for ongoing support in the future. Amazon then lowered their prices of buying an e-book in the hopes of encouraging more people to buy them. While I personally don't believe that paperback books would ever become some sort of relic that people in a hundred years from now will admire at museums, I do believe that in ten years more people will support the trend of ebooks,  leaving the act of reading a paperback book to become less of a commonplace convention.