Where the #$@&%*! are all the books?! On my Kindle.

Oldbooks

People love physical books. They even prefer them over ebooks. Studies say this and bibliophiles believe it.

But it’s just not true. Ebooks, whether on an ereader, an iPad or a smartphone, are a vastly more convenient experience than physical books and are most certainly the way of the future.

I’m writing this on the commute home where on multiple cars ridden by hundreds of people I spot exactly one physical book. Everyone else is staring at their smartphone, tablet or, like me, their computer. There isn’t even a newspaper to be found. When I first started riding the train in the late 1980s, you could barely hear yourself think over the rustling of newsprint.

See also: What happened when I tried to read 100 books in a year

The problem is not, obviously, with books themselves. People are still reading. It's the platform I question.

I often wonder at bookstores, with their aisles and aisles of dead trees compressed into 200 or so pages. Each book a perfect story just waiting for someone to buy and crack it open. How do these places survive? No one is reading physical books any more. Are they?

Yet this recent study says they are. Of course, the linguistics professor interviewed college students. Today's college age students might be the last generation raised using books to study. Children at home and in school today are using tablets and computers to learn. At what point, I wonder, will we see young people who do not know the physical act of turning the page?

Researchers chose well when they selected students, young hip people who romanticize the allure of print. I’ve done that. I, too, love the smell of an old book. I collect them. Among the dozens of dusty, yellowing, fragile classics I own are two magic instruction books from the turn of the 20th century and a Collier's Unabridged Edition: The Works of Charles Dickens from around 1888. Old books are magical.

New books are ridiculous.

We have all this awesome technology that can compress thousands of books into a single, roughly 7-ounce device that can run for two weeks on a single charge and probably saves hundreds of thousands of trees a year, but it’s not good enough? What, exactly, is so special about a new book? Do we really need Khloe Kardashian’s Strong Looks Better Naked in print when it will look just as good, if not better, on an iPad? 10 years from now, when you spot that tome on your bookshelf, what will you feel?

The study notes that for serious reading, physical books are best. In what way, exactly? Not long ago, I was working on a book review. Since it was not yet available as an ebook, the publisher sent me a physical copy. I started reading and, initially took book notes by tearing up Post-It notes, writing little notes on them and sticking them to the corresponding pages. It was a terrible strategy. Eventually I switched to writing notes with page numbers in my iPhone. If I had an ebook version, I could have digitally highlighted all the key parts and even mailed them to myself (or viewed my highlights in my Amazon account).

Not sure how you get this "serious reading" done better on a print book. And I assume that by "serious" they mean studying.

Look, I went to school, I carried backpacks full of textbooks to and from class. They were my blunt-instrument study tools. If I had had ebooks back then I could have accomplished the task of collecting notes, searching for and highlighting content in far fewer steps (sometimes one, as opposed to four or five).

This kind of reminds me of the argument when CDs came out and audiophiles complained that they didn’t sound as good as vinyl. Eventually CDs killed vinyl and then digital killed CDs.

Ironically, audiophiles have managed to resurrect the more expensive and probably less environmentally sound vinyl record, but the reality is most people consume their music in digital form. It’s just hip to buy the vinyl and show it to your friends. Like I said, people romanticize physical media.

I know, the study says that this is how people really want to read. On social media, people remind me that ebooks are more expensive (are they, really?), they need power (true, but so does almost everything else we do in this digitally saturated 21st Century). These are thin arguments and probably sound weak even to those who say them. Ebooks are, in fact, a better reading technology than print. Period.

Are ebooks perfect? Of course not. If you read ebooks on a back-lit iPad or iPhone, you might suffer from eyestrain or have trouble falling asleep at night. Those screens are dimmable and manufacturers are actively introducing ways to auto-manage that light. However, the benefits far outweigh these issues — especially when you look at E-ink-based readers, which use reflective technologies. They're as close as digital can come to print. And all of these platforms offer customizability — adjustable font size, line spacing, font style — that is impossible in physical print.

With ebooks, you can look up words with the touch of a finger, a turned page stays turned and you can easily jump from one page or chapter without carefully holding your finger in place on another spot in the book. Ereaders work with sunlight, just like books, but, when necessary, can provide their own lighting. The only way to do that with a real book is to set it on fire.

It can seem, at times, like paper books are winning the war on digital. There are still bookstores and publishers that are putting out hundreds of books a month. There are people standing in line, clutching precious tomes as they wait for their favorite author to sign them. There are coffee table books that people love to buy and put on their coffee tables – more decoration than information.

But books signings and large format books are not about the future of print, they’re about emotions and aesthetics. We buy the big books to decorate our coffee tables and we get the books signed so we can meet the author and have our own little piece of them in our hands. It’s not about the print.

So you go ahead and wrap yourself up in all the false hope you need. You tell yourself that books, your favorite 400-year-old technology, are forever and that digital ebooks will ultimately be remembered as a failed experiment.

You will be wrong, of course. Just look all around you. The writing is on the digital wall.