There are downsides to both formats, but with paper there's no company keeping track of the date/time I open the books on my selves, or how often I open them, or how long I spend on each page, or how long I take to read the whole thing. I also don't have to worry about the books on my shelves being remotely and silently censored or edited. I don't have to worry about ads being inserted into them and I can freely read them and sell/loan them to others long after they've been banned.
The be fair the parent said "almost." I see this more as a backup of the physical book. Other than search, the experience of physical books is superior, I think, for most people for most uses. You can come up with counterexamples like certain aspects of studying textbooks, etc., but I think this is true in general.
Can most people get physical books? Ebooks are made freely accessible by projects like Anna's Archive. An ebook can be more easily used as a printing source, can be more easily cited in research, and can be better preserved.
The one advantage of physical books is the reading experience itself, but even that is debatable. A Kindle lets you adjust brightness, change fonts—there are fonts that help dyslexic people, for example—and it's lighter than books. Did I mention dark mode?
First, let me step on my own foot for the sake of accuracy: people retain information slightly better when they read paper than screens, so textbooks definitely aren't an example I'd go with. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8715975/
That said, I can come up with far more than a few counterexamples for why ebooks are good, besides combustability:
- Paper books are dense. This adds difficulty to moving and maintaining large collections.
- Paper books take up space. Bookstores and libraries must necessarily remove books to make space for new ones. With ebooks, there's basically no need to remove old ones.
- Paper books are dense and take up space, so when travelling, the reader must carefully select one or two to carry. With ebooks, I can carry my entire ebook library in my pocket.
- Paper books require more effort to duplicate. My e-library is replicated across many devices, including two different offsites. If I spill sauce on a paper book, I need to buy another copy (assuming it's still available).
- Paper books have accessibility issues. As I get older and my vision deteriorates, I will need specialized optical hardware to read small print. On my e-reader, I can just turn up the font size.
In spite of all this, I would never say that ebooks are objectively superior; both are good. I just take issue with all of the people who assume that physical books are so obviously inherently superior, without ever saying why. (See your own post for example.)
