Replying to: Paper books are just better until they aren't
I love reading. I can’t tell you any stories about learning to read. I don’t remember learning to read in the same way that I do not remember learning to walk.
Paper books are more than just text: they are physical objects that take up space. That is both their strength and their weakness. They function as simple decor; I have multiple bookshelves around me right now, and the room would feel empty and barren without them. And when reading they are harder to forget. I can’t tell you off the top of my head what is on my kindle right now, and what more is in the books folder on my computer.
As for the disadvantages of paper books, well… I went to school mostly in the era of paper textbooks. I weighed my bag after one particularly heavy walk home and had a mind to weigh it: it was a full twenty pounds (nine kilograms).
They take up an awful lot of space too. I have come to realize that the value of libraries is not just that you can get books for free, but that you get to give them back when you are done. Flipping through old books for research or nostalgia is nice, but I’m not actually going to do that for most books.
Now for e-books. Obviously they are much more portable. Depending on what you read they may also be more attainable. There is quite a lot of writing on this internet of ours that simply has never been printed. I admit that when I say that, I am expecting you to think mostly of Kindle Unlimited and other self publishing platforms like that. But what I am thinking of for myself is all the fanfiction I’ve downloaded.
It’s not just new books that are a problem to get in paper. There are many old ones that are well worth reading, but are out of print. There’s a good number of things that I would never have read if it weren’t for Project Gutenberg .
So I don’t want to go without either. I don’t think one is better than the other. They seem like they should be similar—it’s the same words and characters (and pictures) stored in different ways, but they attach to our lives and the other things in the world in ways too different to be interchangeable.