I think ereaders are a worse UI for all but wholly linear, light reading. If I’m reading some trashy fiction, ereaders don’t bother me—anything else, and they’r

I think ereaders are a worse UI for all but wholly linear, light reading. If I’m reading some trashy fiction, ereaders don’t bother me—anything else, and they’re worse than a real book. The two-page-at-a-time interface is a ton better and enables features like facing-page translations or setting a full-page illustration or other graphic opposite some text. Got two (largish) books, you can have both open and visible at the same time, four total pages. Footnotes are a lot better in a real book. Typesetters can control formatting—text placement on the page, were page-turns fall, that kind of thing—much better, so poetry texts may be better in a real book. I find holding or marking an endnote or index section and flipping back and forth to that faster, and less error-prone than doing the same on an ereader. The book being a distinct physical object aids with memory. You see the title and author as it sits on the table in a room you’re occupying, even if you’re not reading it (I’ll often forget who wrote an ebook I’m reading, even if I’ve spent hours with it). Spatial memory is powerful. I not-uncommonly use it to locate parts of a book kinda by feel, like tracing a familiar but poorly marked trail in the woods. Ebooks feel like trying to find a particular spot on the open ocean, with no stars and out of sight of land. Full text search is the only directly book-related feature of ebooks that I think gives them an edge, but that’s no replacement for a good index, and if I had to pick only one of the two, I’d take the index. It’s pretty good, though. What remains in their favor is compactness, and boy is that a big advantage, so I do read ebooks even for some books I’d prefer to read on paper. But IMO the UI is, overall, a whole lot worse than a real book. [edit] oops, sold ebooks short on one point: you don’t need to hunt down separate large-print editions, with them. Same thing that makes them so bad for text that benefits from a human having taken care with text formatting and placement, makes them great if you need large print.