People assume the reason a librarian doesn’t own an e-reader is some kind of professional loyalty to physical books, which I understand as an assumption and which is completely wrong. I recommend audiobooks and ebooks to patrons constantly, our digital collection gets real use and I’m glad it exists. This isn’t about what’s good for a library. It’s about a genuinely specific thing that happens in my own head that I didn’t understand until I tried to explain it to someone else and had to actually think about why.

When I read something on paper, I remember where it was on the page. Not the exact words necessarily, but the spatial location, upper left of a right-hand page, near the bottom of a chapter, and that location is doing real work for my memory, it’s a hook I didn’t know I was using until every book turned into an identical scrolling column of text and the hook disappeared. I tried an ereader for about eight months a few years back, a gift, well-intentioned, and I noticed I was finishing books and immediately forgetting entire scenes that I know I would have retained if I’d read them on paper, because there was no “it was near the bottom of a page, right after the chapter break” to anchor them to.

There’s also the practical version of this complaint, which is that I annotate, in pencil, in the margins, and the ereader’s version of that is technically possible and completely dead as an experience, tapping a screen to highlight something doesn’t feel like thinking the way underlining something with an actual pencil does, there’s a small delay and a small effort in physical annotation that seems to be doing something for comprehension that the friction-free digital version isn’t.

I know the environmental argument, I know the space argument, I know a fair number of people who read more because an ereader is lighter than a hardcover, and none of that is wrong, it’s just not my argument. Mine is narrower and more selfish: I remember what I read on paper and I don’t remember what I read on a screen, and until that changes, which I don’t expect it to, I’m going to keep hauling actual books home from my own actual library like it’s still 1998.