Marcus got me an e-reader for my birthday two years ago, a nice one, the kind people who actually like them talk about with real enthusiasm, and I used it for about six weeks with real intention before it ended up in a drawer, where it still is, charged, functional, and basically abandoned. I want to be fair to it, because the six weeks weren’t a failure of the device, they were me discovering something about my own reading habits that I hadn’t fully articulated before.

The convenience arguments are all correct and I don’t dispute a single one of them. Lighter, holds hundreds of books, backlit for reading in bed without waking Marcus, cheaper for a lot of titles, better for travel by an enormous margin. I know all of this and none of it moved me, which took some real self-interrogation to understand rather than just write off as stubbornness for its own sake.

What I landed on, after actually paying attention during those six weeks, is that a huge part of how I remember a book is spatial, I remember where a passage sat on the page, how far into the physical object I was when something happened, the specific weight of the book shifting from my right hand to my left as I got further in. None of that exists on a device where every page looks and feels identical to every other page, and I didn’t realize how much I relied on it until it was gone. I finished two books on the e-reader in that stretch and genuinely cannot picture either of them physically in my memory the way I can picture books I read years ago, which page a certain line was on, roughly, whether it was near the beginning or deep into the back third.

I recognize this might be partly an artifact of decades of reading physical books before e-readers existed, a habit formed early enough that it feels like instinct rather than choice, and if I’d grown up reading on a screen I might feel the opposite way entirely. I don’t think there’s a universal correct answer here, whatever anyone with strong feelings on either side of this argument tends to imply.

What I do know is that the index cards in my shoebox, the whole one-line-per-book ritual, work because I can also flip back through the actual physical object if a card doesn’t jog my memory enough. That system falls apart a little on a device where flipping back means searching a file instead of a shelf. So the e-reader stays in the drawer, genuinely good hardware, not for me, and I’ve stopped feeling like I need to justify that to anyone who brings it up.