Comment by Al-Khwarizmi

I'm an avid reader. But about maybe 15 years ago, I stopped buying printed books because I felt guilty - they took up too much space, and it was running scarce. And surely ebooks were superior - no space wasted, I could take an entire library with me, etc. It was just a matter of getting used to them, and abandoning the impractical romanticism of fetishizing the printed page.

At that time, I pretty much stopped reading. Now it's obvious why that happened, but at that point I didn't really connect the dots. I thought that I ran into a bad streak of books that just didn't hook me much, and then I was very busy, I always seemed to have something else to do rather than continue reading. So for those hypothetical reasons I went from reading several books per month to one per year, or even less.

At some point, I read a printed book and it hooked me like in the old times. And then, it dawned on me that the books being bad, or me being busy, were just excuses. The real reason is that I didn't like electronic reading. I wasn't proud of this. It wasn't a rational attitude. Electronic reading was clearly superior (less space, more flexibility and so on), and the content was exactly the same. I was actually quite ashamed of myself: was I such a shallow person that I didn't appreciate the contents of the literature enough to abstract away from purely materialistic concerns? What kind of person can't appreciate culture or art just because they don't like the medium used to transmit it? But be that as it may, the plain truth was that ebooks didn't hook me, and physical books did, so I admitted it and started buying printed books again. And once again, I'm an avid reader.

In the last few years, papers and studies have started to appear saying that with paper reading we retain more, we concentrate more, we learn more, etc... so I have started to reconcile with myself. Maybe I'm not a shallow materialistic asshole after all, and it's just human nature.