The nostalgic version of this argument is about the smell of books and I want no part of it.

The real difference, for me, is position. A physical book tells your hands where you are. The thickness under your left thumb versus your right is a continuous, unconscious readout of your progress through the argument. You know, without checking, that the turn is coming — that there are only forty pages left and so this cannot be a new thread, it must be the resolution of an old one.

A screen deletes that. Every page is the same page, in the same place, and a percentage in the corner is not the same information because it requires you to look at it. You have swapped a thing the body knows for a thing the eyes must fetch.

What I notice most is recall of location. Weeks later I can find a passage in a paper book because I remember it was on a left-hand page, low, about two-thirds through. That is not a filing system I built deliberately. It is a by-product of the object having a shape. On a screen I remember the sentence and have to search for it, which works, and feels entirely different.

I am not claiming this makes paper better for everyone or every purpose. The e-reader is unbeatable for travel, for very large books, and for reading in bed without a lamp. I use one constantly.

But I have stopped pretending the two are the same activity with different hardware. For anything with an argument I need to hold in my head across two hundred pages, paper wins, and the reason is not romantic — it is that a book is a physical object and my memory is, embarrassingly, still mostly about where things are.