I recently read a printed book for the first time in ages and had a really weird experience. I wanted to find a particular passage, but muscle memory took over and I found myself pressing Ctrl-F on my leg. For a fraction of a second, I thought that the book was broken. It took me a moment to remember to look in the index.

It really threw me for a loop. Electronic texts are so pervasive in my life that I had half forgotten how to interact with a printed book. My automatic familiarity with print had faded enough that I was consciously aware of the properties of the medium. I was frustrated by the inability to zoom in on diagrams or copy and paste. The margins weren't big enough for my notes. There was no autogenerated list of highlighted passages. I felt like a child confronted with a VHS tape or a classic Gameboy.

I grew up obsessed with books. At the back of my desk drawer, there's a little envelope containing the membership cards for eleven different library services. For most of my life, I rarely went anywhere without a book to hand. I spent a large part of my adolescence digging through the dustier shelves of second-hand book shops. Still, I can't shake the feeling that print is largely obsolete. I don't feel nostalgic about books, I'm just frustrated that so few of them are available in digital format.