I own an ereader. It was a gift, I use it on planes, and every single time someone finds out I still mostly buy physical paperbacks they treat it like I’ve confessed to something quaint and slightly inefficient, like I still balance a checkbook by hand. I get the arguments. Lighter to travel with, adjustable text size, one device instead of a shelf that’s started creeping into the hallway. None of that has moved me even a little, and I’ve finally figured out why, and it’s not really about the reading experience itself.
It’s the log. I keep a paper notebook, not an app, where every book I finish gets a line, title, date, a star rating that’s really just a private shorthand for myself, and sometimes a single sentence if something about it demanded one. I’ve been doing this for years now and the notebook itself has become a kind of object I actually like handling, coffee ring on page forty, a corner bent from the time I dropped it in the bath which, yes, I know. An app would technically do the same job and would probably do it better, searchable, backed up, no risk of bath water. I don’t want that job done better. I want the friction of it, the fact that writing the line down takes a few extra seconds I have to actually spend.
Same logic with the physical books, honestly. Half the pleasure of finishing something like Red Mars was three months of watching an actual paperback get more worn at the edges, a visible record of how long a book had lived on my nightstand, dog eared and started to buckle a little in that specific way a big book does when you’ve been carrying it around. An ereader gives you none of that feedback. Every book looks identical to every other book, same screen, same font, no physical evidence that this one took longer or mattered more.
I know the counterargument, that this is all sentiment and none of it is about the actual words on the page, and sure, fine, guilty. But I spend my whole workday checking whether things are built to the tolerance they’re supposed to be, precise, mechanical, no room for feeling about it, and reading is the one part of my life I don’t want optimized that way. The paperback is slower and heavier and worse for travel and I’m keeping every single one of those inconveniences on purpose. Buy whatever gets you reading, genuinely, I don’t care what anyone else does. I just know what works for me, and it’s the version with the coffee ring.