[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?