Half my coworkers read on a tablet or a dedicated e-reader now, and I get all the actual arguments, lighter to carry, adjustable text size, a whole library in one device on a trip, I’m not disputing any of it on the merits. I still haven’t budged, not once, not even for travel, and for a long time I told myself this was about the reading experience itself, the weight of a book in one hand, the smell, all the things people say when they’re being a little precious about it. I don’t think that’s actually the real reason anymore.

The real reason, as far as I’ve worked out, is the reading log on the cabinet door and everything that comes with keeping it that way. A physical book leaves a physical trace, it sits on a shelf after I’m done with it, or it goes into the discard bin at work if it came from there, and either way there’s an object I can point to that says this happened, I read this, here’s the actual thing. An ebook just disappears back into the device the second I’m done, no different physically from the fifty other titles sitting invisibly next to it, and something about that erasure bothers me more than I expected it to the one time I tried a borrowed e-reader for a trip.

There’s also, I’ll admit, a professional bias I can’t fully separate from the personal one. I spend my working hours in a building organized entirely around physical objects moving from shelf to hand to return cart and back again, and I think that rhythm has trained something in me that resists a format with no physical journey at all. A library built entirely on ebooks would still be a library, technically, and plenty of good ones function that way now, but it wouldn’t be the specific job I actually do, sorting, shelving, the tactile parts of it, and I wonder sometimes if my preference for physical books is really just an extension of loving that part of the job more than I usually admit out loud.

I don’t think e-reader people are wrong, to be clear, plenty of my favorite readers I know use one exclusively and read more because of it, which is its own kind of unimpeachable argument. I just know myself well enough now to admit the paper preference isn’t really about paper. It’s about wanting a shelf that remembers what I did, the same shelf logic that runs my whole actual life, apparently, whether I’m at work or standing in my own kitchen.