In recent years, more and more people are choosing to read e-books rather than paper books. Do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages?

With the development of technology and the internet, e-books are more available than ever before, and increasingly more people are opting for them instead of traditional books. While there are certain disadvantages of digital books, I believe that the benefits of them are far more significant. On the one hand, there are two main reasons why the shift towards reading e-books from paper books is disadvantageous. Firstly, when readers are exposed to reading from the screen for an extended period of time, their eyesight might be impaired. Medically, it has been proven that a person looking at their screen for more than 2 hours might develop eye-related illnesses such as cataracts and glaucoma due to strain on nerves. Another drawback of this change is closely linked with economy. This is because publishing houses, tree logging industries, and paper recycling establishments add up to millions of dollars and employ a large number of people; so, giving up traditional reading materials means huge losses. However, I would argue that these drawbacks are far outweighed by the benefits. Most importantly, reading e-books saves the environment. As we know, manufacturing paper involves a huge number of trees to be logged; consequently, leading to deforestation, desertification and a marked increase in the amount of pollution. The final reason in favor of e- books would be their price. Simply comparing the prices of e-books and paper ones on Amazon should be enough to deduce that customers benefit from digital books financially, caring for the environment at the same time. Although there are some obvious disadvantages to reading e-books, overall, I believe that we gain more than we lose from them because, of all the reasons listed, saving the environment is the strongest.