[ralferoo]

It entirely depends on the book. For most modern paperbacks, I'd agree with you - the book is often just a means of transmission of the text. Even with modern books though, there are plenty of examples where it's intended to be a physical object that affects you in some way, not just as a sequence of words that happens to be on a page. You'll see some books that chose weird sizes or paper finishes or even variations in font size through the book, because that's as much a part of it as the text itself.

In the early days of books, especially before the printing press, they were primarily considered works of art. You'd have ornate flourishes at the start of a chapter because it took so long to copy manually, adding something visually appealing wouldn't have made it take much longer to create in the grand scheme of things. There might be beautiful illustrations with vibrant colours competing for attention as much as the textual content.

Even with much newer books, you can tell the difference. One I remember from my childhood is A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh with its illustrations by E. H. Sheppard. To most readers, the illustrations are as much a part of the book as the text, and yet there are cheap versions that contain the text only which are probably interesting if you've never seen the original but just feel incomplete and disappointing if you have.

With Victorian printing, you'd sometimes have outlines of illustrations printed in black and white and then someone would colour them in by hand with watercolour prior to sale. Every book would be slightly unique. I've only seen one such book when I was very young, something my mum had rescued from her grandfather's collection as a child.

Whilst new books are also great (there's nothing quite like opening a new hardbook, having a smell of it and settling down to read), old books are also wonderful, not just for the contents because also the look and feel of them that transports you back to another time. I've got a few (probably not valuable) old books that are over 100 years old, and in those days people would usually add a handwritten note on the first page saying who was buying it for who and what the occasion was, and often in beautiful old-fashioned handwriting that itself is art now. This is just a glimpse into the history of the book and the world as it was at the time this book was new, that just add richness to the book itself.

Reading a book isn't just about the contents, as there's so much more to sense when handling something physical, especially old books that aren't perfect in some way and so have their own story that's different to every other copy.

[tialaramex]

In 1986 "the book is more than just the text" is a sound justification for why a significant proportion of library stock can't "just" be digitised.

But we're long past that, we can digitise the images, paper texture, layout choices, almost everything if we choose. There are a handful of things we might justify keeping anyway, but on the whole the digitisation is just a marked improvement.

[dbspin]

As other commentators have pointed out - the fact that we can do something technically, at the highest levels of competence - does not mean we usually do, or can do such a thing at scale. If you look through the enormous majority of publicly available scans, from Google Books to Project Gutenberg, you'll find low resolution scans with alignment issues, colour issues even missing pages. You're also accessing books at the whim of the legal and technical infrastructure you don't control.

Sure you could keep a secret digital archive to pass hand to hand for circumstances when (as has just happened to the internet archive) thousands or millions of books are suddenly banned. But you're relying on access to open computer architectures that don't phone home your reading of those books (like Microsoft's 'Recall'). You're reliant on power. You're reliant on compatibility into the future. With a printed book, you have a physical object, duplicated hundreds of thousands of times and distributed. A physical book can be read by daylight in a refugee camp, a war zone, a desert.

It may seem a silly example, but if the Roman or better yet the Aztec empire had written their manuscripts digitally - we likely wouldn't have a single record from that era. They would have been erased through chaos or deliberate eradication. Don't be so quick to dismiss the physical.

[greenie_beans]

but then you need computers and software, and those things change with time. you don't need anything but sunlight and your eyes to read a physical copy of a book.

what are some other technologies that we still use without any modifications on the original invention, like the physical book?