[obviouslygreen]

Sort of tangential, but my first job was working in a Barnes & Noble, and it's still the one I miss the most. More than that, while I do believe electronic distribution is both more ecologically rational and practically efficient, I'm one of those people who was raised on physical books as an avid reader... and there really is something very significant lost without that tactile experience.

I suppose it's positive that more and more people will grow up without that, so we can cut down on the number of trees we cut down, but it's still sad in a way to see that experience going away. The feel (and even sound and smell, in some cases) of a book can be very intimate.

[ravitation]

For me the tactile experience is incredibly important, especially as a software engineer that stares at a screen most of the day. Experiencing an object on more than just one level is something I think we've lost a lot of. Reading a substantial book electronically has almost no appeal to me and I love to read.

[hypertexthero]

People learn in different ways, and I remember reading, perhaps in [Pragmatic Thinking and Learning](https://pragprog.com/book/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-learn...), that your tactile sense is as important for learning as your visual and aural senses, and so on.

I like the smell of books, too.

[acjohnson55]

I doubt tactility (from a learning perspective) really comes into play while reading a book, as opposed to on a screen. That's not to denigrate paper book reading as an enjoyable experience, but let's not go overboard :)

[HCIdivision17]

The effect's subtle. I read Wycoff's Mindmapping in high school, and have tried the techniques off and on. One interesting idea is that you're constantly making background connections, and these can play a small but non-negligible association in the mind. So if you always chew a minty gum when doing your math work, it helps a bit in bootstrapping you back into that frame of mind later, like smelling bacon sizzling and feeling restful from associating it with family breakfasts.

Whether it works or not, well, I think it does, but it's no panacea. I prefer to think of it as a hint to start preloading a frame of mind (like the Jargon File's second use of 'swap' [0]). When I sit with a second hand book that's got that mild musty wood and glue smell, it gets me in the frame of mind to read. YMMV.

[0] https://www.catb.com/jargon/html/S/swap.html

[nirvdrum]

For me it's a matter of quickly referencing material. For whatever reason, I seem to recall where things are roughly by the thickness of the stack of pages. The percentage bar on the Kindle doesn't replicate that. And flipping between pages on a device just takes too long. So, I have a hard time reading any sort of reference material on a Kindle.

[icebraining]

Why not search for some keyword?

[nirvdrum]

It's never as fast and document search on e-readers seems to be straight word match rather than any form of intelligent indexing. If I don't recall where something is, it's almost always faster to use the book's index than it is to naively search through the doc, in my experience.

[aethertap]

I'm in the same boat, or perhaps more extreme (I have about 2000 physical books). One of the things I don't like about ebooks is just plain usability. Almost everything I read is technical in nature, and I like to take margin notes, cross reference things within and between books, and generally add to the content and organization of the book as I read it. I rarely have a need to search for text, and if I do I can generally find it quickly because of my notes and just the memory of where it was in the book.

I've only tried a small number of ebook readers, but nothing has even come close to the usability of paper books for me doing that kind of stuff. A book that I'm going to study has to be paper, for now.

[coldpie]

I tried ebooks for a few months, a few years ago. What killed it for me is I can't lend them out. I often read a book and recommend it to a friend, and even hand them the book to read if they happen to be at my house. Even just for those few months, this happened often enough to be a pain. So I stopped and went back to buying physical books.

I suppose e-readers are more useful for people who read _lots_ of books. I read maybe a dozen fiction novels per year. If I read at two or three times that rate, I can see managing a physical collection becoming too much of a hassle.

[VLM]

"What killed it for me is I can't lend them out."

Also, gifts.

In the future it seems likely that books you buy for yourself will be ebooks and books you get as a gift from someone, as an interior decoration, will be physical books. This has some pretty big implications for brick and mortar layout and design. If you segment the gift marketplace aggressively enough you probably don't need as many physical books, bookstores could end up being very small stores rather than the trend toward library sized palaces.

[chrisbennet]

Same here. B&N is "my" bookstore but I only buy eBooks to read on the plane. Lending and borrowing books is nice way of connecting with friends. You can technically loan (some) ebooks in the Nook ecosystem - but only for 2 weeks and you have to add them to your "group" or something.

[coldpie]

The shackles that digital purchases bind you with make me resist buying digital whenever possible. Subscription services, like Netflix, are a whole different, and interesting, beast.

[icehawk219]

I'm with you on the tactile experience. I read a lot and have tons of books piling up around my condo. I've bought multiple e-readers and have an iPad but whenever I try to use them to replace physical books I just can't do it. For me holding a physical book, getting to flip through the pages, the feel of it, there's just something about it I've come to love and I'm not sure exactly what or why.

[aquadrop]

I like both approaches, because they offer different advantages. I tend to like reading physical books in natural lighting and mostly fiction. Like today, frosty morning with clear blue sky when sun comes through a window and illuminates the room I can't resist lay on the couch and read some physical fiction book in calm environment, it's quite pleasing. On the other hand, reading from ebook/tablet/desktop gives more interactive capabilities, I can get translation of some words, create bookmark, I can do search within book or on the internet etc., so it's more convenient for technical stuff or when I'm trying to improve language skills. So both ways are interesting, and I sure hope physical books won't die out.

[untothebreach]

Agreed, it is very much an internal conflict of mine. On one hand, I love all the things about physical books that you listed. On the other hand, I love being able to put my kindle in my pocket and have my "library" with me.

[acjohnson55]

There will always be a place for physical books, but that place is going to be tend to be as more of a luxury good or for items that really lend themselves to the paper medium.