I think most people my age and older would instantly say physical books are better. It feels nice to hold something hefty in the hands when reading. The smell is nice both for new books and for old antique books. I suspect we all have a romantic image in our heads of some big Victorian Library with a cozy space near a fireplace for an easy chair and reading (or napping).

I wonder if younger people have that same image? I suspect if one didn't grow up with that image, one might be less attached to physical books. That is to say, I suspect that a lot of older peoples' preference for physical books is the romanticism.

Ebooks have a lot going for them. First and foremost, they are easier to carry. You can hold an entire book in your hand, regardless of how big it is. You can hold an entire library in your hand. Size is no longer a limit! Buy a few hundred physical books and unless you have a large house, you will be pressed for storage space. Buy a few thousand ebooks and the storage space is exactly the same as just one ebook. This is not just a storage boon, but that that makes moving much easier. As a bookwork, I'm fairly sure the majority of my moving items when going off to university and each of my subsequent apartments was boxes of books (and boxes and boxes). When I moved to Japan I brought with me...books. Moving around over here, I move around boxes of books. If I ever return to the States, I will be bringing books. It's hard to overstate the appeal of being able to store all of these books on a single device that is no larger than a single physical book.

Ebooks likely also have the advantage in reading. E-ink isn't much different for our eyes than real ink, and of course with ebooks you can increase the size of the font to find your perfect comfort level, even change the font to something like Lexend to make it easier to read.

All points don't go to ebooks, however. In research a physical book is especially useful because you can easily flip between pages for reference. While such a thing is possible with ebooks, it is slow and doesn't work as well, and when you have just a screen it's more difficult to compare and lay things next to each other. Well... unless you happen to have enough money to buy multiple ebooks so you can lay them next to each other. But in addition to costing a lot, that would kind of defeat the point of having an ebook reader. Maybe eventually when the refresh rate of e-ink gets up there and the screen size of ebooks gets up there and we get better software... but for now, this is definitely a point for physical books.

There there is annotation. I think both forms of book have their own unique advantages and disadvantages here. With physical books one can very easily mark up the book, underlining, highlighting, writing notes in the margins, etc. But once written, removing any of this becomes nearly impossible. With ebooks, one can do the same kinds of markup, but doing so is a little more tedious. Underlining/highlighting is easy enough, but adding a note is slow and painful. However, removing any of these annotations is child's play. Another advantage here is that searching all notes in a book or all notes in a library becomes possible. This can really aid research!

I think for me, the advantages of ebooks outweigh the negatives and make them the preferred form. Yes, again, I love the romance of physical books. If I were Elon Musk rich I would absolutely buy all the physical books since moving and space wouldn't be a concern. But as things stand, I can't ignore the good points. While I do have a few nice physical editions of favorite books (The Lord of the Rings books, the first Dune, a few others) and any book that doesn't have an ebook version (many older haiku books, for instance), but whenever I can I buy the ebook copy of a book instead of the physical copy.

How about you?

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon.