I don’t have a good practical argument for this anymore, I want to say that up front. My apartment isn’t big, my shelves are genuinely at capacity, and I still walk into the used bookstore near the clinic on a slow Saturday and walk out with a paperback instead of just downloading whatever it is I wanted to read. Priya has an ereader and has made the case to me more than once, you could carry a hundred books in your bag, you’d never run out mid-flight, you could adjust the font size when your eyes are tired after a long shift. All of it is correct and none of it has moved me.

Part of it is the reading log. I’ve kept a physical notebook of what I’ve read since college, and there’s something about seeing the actual spine on the shelf that a list entry in an app doesn’t replicate for me, the specific cover I associate with a specific stretch of my life, the copy of Chaos with the corner still bent from a bag I used to carry to campus. Part of it is more embarrassing than that, I like dog-earing pages instead of using a bookmark, which I know is a small crime to some people, and there’s something satisfying about a paperback that shows its wear, a spine that cracks in a particular place because you always open it there.

I know the ereader math is better. I know I’ll run out of shelf space eventually and have to make a real decision about it, probably sooner than I want to admit. But there’s a specific pleasure in a physical stack getting slightly unmanageable that a clean digital library doesn’t give me, some proof visible in the room that I’ve actually been reading instead of just meaning to. I’ll probably regret this opinion the day I have to move again. I’m not getting an ereader before then.

There’s a used bookstore about ten minutes from the clinic, small, kind of cramped, run by a guy who’s stopped asking what I’m looking for because I never actually know until I’m standing in front of the science fiction shelf reading spines. I go on slow Saturdays when I’ve got nothing scheduled and don’t need anything specific, which Priya says defeats the purpose of a bookstore trip, that you’re supposed to go in wanting something. I’ve never worked that way. Half of what’s on my shelves now came from a cover catching my eye or a title I half remembered from a review years back, and I like that the store forces a kind of randomness an algorithm recommending things to me never would.

The reading log makes the case for me better than I can when I try to explain it out loud. I flip back through the notebook sometimes on a slow night and the handwriting alone tells me something about where I was, rushed entries from a stretch riding the bus to work with a long transfer window, careful ones from a quieter season. An app would keep the same information technically, title, date, a star rating if I bothered, but it wouldn’t have the ink getting lighter halfway through a page because the pen was dying. It’s evidence more than information, that a specific version of me sat somewhere and did this.

Priya asked me once if I’d at least consider it for travel, just for flights, keep the paperbacks at home and use the ereader as a road tool, and that’s the version of the argument that’s actually gotten closest to working on me. I still haven’t done it. I bring one book, sometimes two if the trip’s long enough, and accept the extra weight in the bag as a cost of an opinion I’m apparently committed to more than I can fully justify.