Why I Still Buy Physical Books

People assume, because of what I do for work, that I’d be the first person defending physical books on principle, some kind of trade loyalty to the paper. That’s not really it. I’ve read plenty of things on a screen and gotten just as much out of the words themselves. What I actually can’t get from a screen is the specific information a physical copy carries that has nothing to do with the text, and once you spend enough years handling secondhand books for a living, that information starts to matter to you whether you meant it to or not.

A book tells you things before you’ve read a word of it. Who owned it, sometimes, if there’s a name written inside the cover, crossed out and rewritten by whoever came next. How it was treated, spine cracked in one spot from being left open flat on a nightstand, or barely touched at all, which tells its own story depending on the book. Underlining in a stranger’s hand that you either find intrusive or oddly companionable, I go back and forth depending on my mood and the book. None of that exists in a file. A file is the same file whether one person’s read it or ten thousand, and there’s a real loss in that even if it’s not the kind of loss most people are arguing about when they have this fight.

There’s also just the handling itself, something I notice more than most people because I spend hours a week doing it professionally, and it turns out professional exposure didn’t wear the pleasure of it down the way I expected it might. The weight of a book in one hand, the specific give of a spine that’s been read a few times versus one still stiff, the smell, which I know sounds like an affectation but genuinely isn’t, old paper has a real chemical smell to it that changes with age and I like it.

None of this is an argument that a screen is worse for reading, mechanically. I know plenty of people who read more, and better, on a screen than they ever did with paper, and I’m not going to pretend that’s a lesser way to encounter a book. It’s just not what I want for myself, not after spending this much of my working life around the physical objects specifically, learning to read a book’s condition the way you’d read a person’s face.

I’ll probably always have more books than shelf space, buying secondhand copies of things I already own because a specific edition catches my eye at a sale before I can stop myself. That’s not really about reading efficiently. It’s about wanting the object as much as the words in it, and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise.