People assume, reasonably, that someone who writes documentation for a living and stares at a monitor eight hours a day would be perfectly comfortable reading a novel the same way, an e-reader instead of a paperback, same words, less clutter on the shelf. I own an e-reader. It’s in a drawer. I’ve tried, genuinely tried, three or four separate times over the years to make it my primary reading device, and every single time I’ve drifted back to paper within a couple weeks without really deciding to.

Part of it, I think, is that my job has trained me to read a screen a specific way, scanning for the error, the ambiguous step, the place where something’s going to break. That’s a useful skill for reviewing a vendor’s install guide and a genuinely bad way to read a novel, where the whole point is slowing down and letting a sentence do its work instead of hunting it for problems. Paper seems to switch something off in my head that the backlit rectangle doesn’t, an actual context shift between work-reading and the other kind, and I don’t think that’s just nostalgia talking, though I’ll admit nostalgia’s probably doing some of the work too.

The more honest reason, though, is the physical memory of a book. I can usually tell you roughly where in a book something happened by how the pages felt in my hand at that point, near the start, deep in the fat middle, right before the spine’s worn thin toward the end. That’s not a metaphor I made up to sound precious about it, it’s just literally how I locate things when I’m trying to remember a passage, flipping by feel more than by any table of contents. An e-reader gives you a percentage counter instead, which is accurate and tells me nothing useful at all.

I know the arguments against me here and I don’t have great rebuttals for most of them. Travel is easier with one device instead of a bag of books. Storage is a real problem I don’t have a real answer for, and Priya’s pointed out more than once that our shelves are approaching a load-bearing-wall situation. Font size adjustability would have genuinely helped me with a couple of the denser things I’ve reviewed here, where small dense type on cheap paper made an already hard book harder. None of that’s moved me. I’ll take the drawer stays where the e-reader lives, and the shelves keep filling up, and I’ll keep pretending I have a plan for where the next one goes.