[SethMurphy]

This would follow the same path as the music industry and the revival of vinyl record albums. Most are collected and not played since streaming is so much easier and portable. I would go further and say that paperbacks will fall almost completely out of favor as they are less durable and could be seen as more of a "waste" environmentally. A bookshelf in a home is still a wall of virtue and interest signals and I don't think that will go away completely.

[Qwertious]

Paper books have legal value - you have rights to resell it, for instance, that you don't have for ebooks. Until we unfuck those, ebooks will never completely replace them.

Paper books aren't particularly environmentally wasteful - if you buy one extra electronic device (say, an ereader), that basically outstrips the damage of any number of books you'd buy. That might not be relevant to the perception, though.

Books as expensive wallpaper will definitely keep being a thing while dead-tree books are common, but they're fundamentally about conveying an impression, and impressions can change - if ebooks become the overwhelming majority to the point that office decoration is the main point of books, then anyone who sees the bookshelf will assume you're a poser doing it for the image, and thus people will stop doing it. So wallpaper-bookshelves can't exist as a sole purpose of books (probably).

[ghaff]

There’s still a large “I like the feel of a real book even if it’s a paperback” contingent. But I assume that is much less true of relatively younger people. (I’ve gotten rid of a lot of my books that are in the public domain and would largely clear out most of my paperbacks if I could magically get them in digital format.

[panzagl]

My daughters (gen Z) prefer physical books, though we'll see if that persists past the first time they have to move apartments themselves.

[pjmlp]

Record stores that still exist aroud me seem to have travelled back in time, I now feel like the first days of the CD sales, where they were at a corner in a shop full of vynil records.

Also someone is buying those vynil players with bluetooth and USB connectors.

[greenie_beans]

i have some rare paperbacks that have insurable value. this is a counterpoint to the assumption that paperbacks are worthless.

[prosqlinjector]

Of course rare books are valuable. The point is that if you want to buy a physical book you probably will pay $10-15 more for the nice version. The market for the cheap entry is smaller.