In this paper I am going to discuss some problems regarding physical books. I will present you two main reasons which, in my opinion, will cause printed books to be non-existent in the future or at least keeps their amount on a minimal level. The first and the main reason is an economical one. Imagine the whole process that is behind making books which I will now simply describe. First, you need workers and machines that will cut trees which are obviously necessary. After that you must deliver this wood to a facility that use a special processing called pulping to turn the wood into paper. Then again, you need to transport the paper to a book printing company when they print a desired amount of books using offset printing. And what follows? Another transportation. This time to book shops. As you can see it involves a lot of traveling and employees and it concerns paper in general. So the question how to save a lot of money and unfortunately have less employees at the same time is easy to answer: Digital distribution or a popular term že-books", if you want. .
As a customer you just download the book you want into your computer, tablet, phone, kindle, etc. No physical copies of books are necessary. It makes the way to get your customers what they want quite easy and significantly cheaper. Yes, in its final form and fully expanded it would mean massive layoffs but that is a discussion for another time.
The second reason - durability and portability of the books. I know everybody is not like that but imagine yourself for a second as a keen reader who reads roughly 2-4 books a month. You read it usually whenever there is a free time available " during commuting, on holidays, in a bed, etc. You want to have them at your disposal so it means you have to carry them around with you. Not only it takes place in your bag, backpack or purse, which is not always possible, but this carrying is also eventually a way how to damage them.
