This is interesting to me. Mostly because I no longer purchase physical books and am actively working on getting rid of the thousands of physical books in my house (I don't want to ever move them again). I've gone to pure digital books. Of course my surprise that physical bookstores are rebounding is just me projecting my own experience onto everyone else.

I went digital for a while, but switched back to print.

What I found was, ebooks aren't that much less expensive. Possibly more expensive, in that I don't believe the amount of money I have spent on e-readers, amortized over all the ebooks I have bought, works out to a lower price than what I'd have spent on print copies of the same set of books.

And, even if I dis save some money, the fact remains that I just don't enjoy the e-reader experience as much. I love browsing books at a physical bookstore, I love reading the staff recommendation cards, looking at what the book clubs are reading, etc. I love the physical experience of turning the page, I love how much crisper and more readable the paper is, I love the smell of the paper, etc.

The only bit I hated was how much space the books take up, and how annoying they are to deal with when I'm moving. And at some point I hit on the solution to that problem: Pass 'em on. By the time I get to the last page of a book, I already know if there's a good chance I'll want to read it again. If there isn't, why hold on to it? That one realization reduced the size of my book collection by maybe 90%. Thanks to the magic of used bookstores, I was even able to turn them into more books I hadn't read yet.

I've still got the e-reader, but nowadays it's mostly fed by Humble Bundles.

Another win for physical books, at least for me, is that I generally find vague searching to be faster in physical books.

By vague searching I mean searching for something where I don't remember enough exact phrases or low frequency words from it to use an electronic search.

With a physical book I often remember the approximate physical location within the book of what I'm looking for, and often nearby things to further help with the search. For instance, I might remember that the equation I'm trying to find was on a left hand page around 40% into the book, with the right hand page having a plot of some function that was growing logarithmically. I can then quickly flip through the book and find it.

I don't get that physical sense of location within the book when reading e-book.

> What I found was, ebooks aren't that much less expensive.

Ebooks are that less expensive, because they are mostly free now: ebook filesharing communities like LibGen (part of the Sci-Hub universe) have had 95% of what I want to read. I own a Kindle and read voraciously, but I have never had to actually pay for an ebook. With cost savings like that, it is hard to go back to paper except for a very few genres (such as poetry, for me at least) where the physical artifact is an important part of the experience.

> Thanks to the magic of used bookstores, I was even able to turn them into more books I hadn't read yet.

For me, that's the primary reason ebooks don't appeal to me: they always cost much more, despite the fact that I don't mind reading on devices I already own (e.g. smartphone). I almost never buy new, never buy hardback, and I (re-)sell on the used market frequently enough that the average net cost of a physical book is significantly lower.

It's funny how you buy a physical copy, but license very limited rights with an electronic copy.

I think it's in part due to publishers artificially inflating print prices verses ebooks. I frequently find books on Amazon where the Kindle ebook is more expensive than the paperback.

But like you I have also gotten rid of almost all my print books, although I bought one from a bookstore yesterday. Impulse buy.

The print book has to compete with used copies; the ebook doesn't.

The ebook has to compete with pirated copies which a lot of people do not have qualms about sharing with friends.

For mass market fiction it's the other way around. I bought a Kindle because of the ridiculous inflation in paperback prices over the past 15 years.

I have been doing the same. I have moved to the other side of the country and then to another continent, books are the most cumbersome non furniture objects to move.

However, while I like some aspects of digital like the ability to leave synchronized notes, synced progress between terminals, powerful search, .. I also really miss the feeling of paper. Not to mention that it looks like we are either still missing a good digital book format or publishers are just doing an half assed job with the existing ones but anything not alphanumerical (notes, graphs, pictures, etc) almost always look awful on digital versions. Heck, even the cover is usually fairly low res.

At least part of the problem is that digital, e.g. Kindle, format books are produced/formatted for the least-common-denominator like a basic epaper Kindle. That's fine for basically text. Sucks for graphically rich content which would be a lot more effort to produce in any case.

The alternative is to produce content aimed at 10" iPad/Android and above and leave out other users.

I know it is a lot more work, but we have been able to do content that scales for a while.

First on desktop then on mobile. Sure, we still don't have the perfect tools to do this (looking at you, all the design tools that only give 'pixel perfect' previews when we need scalable ones) but this is in an acceptable state.

Could we do the same for books ? Vectorial assets for schemas, high quality cover and illustrations, Scaling instructions.

Sure, some rare tricks, like having a blank page in the middle of the book for a dramatic effect, or having a specific word after the page turn will be lost. But for 99% of the usecases, I believe we can do much better.

This only works with (relatively) newer books that have digital versions. I have a few books that are only available as physical copies, I love them and don't want to give them up.