I'll start with an honest confession. I think the moment I lost my touch in reading was the moment I started doing more PDF than hardcopies. It wasn’t intentional. It just sort of happened gradually, like one day I realized I wasn’t as excited about reading as I used to be, and when I traced it back, it was around the time I started reading more on screens.
Now hear me out, hardcopies have a different feeling for me than using my phone. First off, who doesn't like the smell of new books and the fresh, crisp pages as you keep turning them over? There’s something very comforting and personal about that. And funny enough, I didn’t even have to buy most of the books I read growing up. I have a lot of older siblings who had stacks of books from school, so there was always something lying around for me to pick up. I could literally walk into any corner at home and find a book to indulge in.
It feels more satisfactory for me grabbing a book to relax with than opening the same book on my phone. I don’t know how to explain it well, but I find it hard to focus while reading on a screen. My eyes get tired easily, and it’s like my mind doesn’t fully sink into the story. I’ve had books I downloaded as PDFs because everyone said they were amazing, but I still haven’t made it past the first 10 chapters, or even if I managed to finish, I honestly couldn’t tell you what the book was about. It just doesn’t stick.
Now compare that to reading a hardcopy. The thrill of flipping to a new page, mentally screaming, or even slamming the book shut when I come across a wild plot twist, that’s the real deal. Plus, I hardly ever forget what I read from a physical book.
Oh, you miss the part where the main action happened? You can find it in chapter X, pages Y-Z, lines XYZ.”
I can remember the details clearly, with photographic memory dancing in the corner.
That being said, I won’t act like PDFs don’t have their own sunny moments. One thing they definitely win at is convenience. It’s so easy now to find almost any book you want with just a quick search or download. I remember back in school, how much stress we used to go through, moving from one bookstore to another just to find a particular set of books for our literature classes. It would’ve been a whole different story if we were allowed to bring phones to school back then. E-books would’ve saved us some serious long distance journeys.
And yes, PDFs are great when you’re in transit or somewhere you need a quick distraction. In situations like that, it’s actually helpful to just pull out your phone and continue reading. But to he honest, there's really no emotional attachment . No nostalgia of when a drop of food stained a page because I couldn’t stop reading while eating. No folded corners, no little notes in the margins, no flipping back to reread a favorite line I underlined with a pen.
So yeah, I miss reading in the entirety of it. I’ve tried to reconnect with it through PDFs, but I won’t lie, it hasn’t worked so well. Some books I’ve read on screen had great stories and meaningful information they carry, but I could just tell they would’ve slapped way harder if I had the physical copy in my hands.
In a nutshell, my perfect reading setup will always be with a pile of books, mostly because of how I feel throughout the entire reading moment. E-books and PDFs are useful and they’ll always have a place, but they’ll always come second for me.