Huh, I have the reverse preference. Recreational books are read sequentially, like tape, so they suit e-book readers well. Also, they're usually plaintext. Reference/education books - with those I need fast random access, which mostly rules out the usual digital form, and extra formatting and media used (tables, images, figures, equation) make them problematic on e-book readers.

Same for me. I would say an electronic book has the advantage in searchability, but a well curated index might actually beat a naive text search most of the time.

On desktop, maybe, but I haven't used a decent enough reading software (like most web stuff, Amazon cloud reader is barely fit for purpose, and while I don't know what's "state of the art" in epub/PDF readers on desktop, the few I tried didn't facilitate reliable search and fast navigation either), and most technical e-books I keep as PDFs anyway, because the formatting almost always matters.

On e-book readers like Kindle, a profound disagreement. I can easily find what I'm looking for in a 1000 page book even without using an index in less time than it takes to type in a search query into Kindle's searchbox (especially since I switched from the old keyboard Kindle to touch-only Paperwhite). If there's a well-curated index at the end of the book, it's only that much better.

I think software could get somewhat closer to paper experience, but it needs to be faster. As long as random page access takes more than ~100 ms from selecting the page to full render (and in my experience, it's often close to 300-500 ms), you cannot really flip through an e-book the way you would through a paper book.

(Tangent: it's another of many cases where performance actually matters, because the difference between lighting fast and fast enough to tick boxes on your sprint plan is entire family of use cases.)

My split is reference/search (ebook), entertainment/immersion (ebook) and education/assimilation (paper). Ebooks are still too undifferentiated and featureless for effective learning. For example I can often remember that a definition or philosophy is in a large green book with an illustrated cover, 3/4 of the way into the book, on the bottom of the left hand page, author's notes in the left margin, citation reference in the bottom margin, smell of the page, paper color, font, initial cap size on the paragraph. That hooks into my recall and keeps the book interesting while I memorize it. Ebook formats lose a lot of information.

I'm curious about this:

"I can grep through the entire set of books for something in particular"

What software do you use for this? I'm guessing you're not literally running grep at a command line on your mobile.

So what software do you use that allows you to search through multiple ebooks? Is there an Android or ios equivalent to DocFetcher?

I actually use grep, although I whipped up a simple GUI front end for it.

Agreed. As for reference materials, you missed the key point that they tend to go out of date. An outdated reference book is largely useless, in contrast to a good novel.

weird but the back and forth here made me realize something about ebooks. they provide some kind of privacy and confidentiality.

printed books on the other hand give away what you are reading -- unless you put them in those fancy covers. and that is if you can even find the right size.

you don't get the eyes and no one will ask you what you are reading on your phone. never thought about it that way before...

How do you do this in practice? What do you use for OCR, and what do you use to search all the books on your phone?

I don't OCR, I buy the books in electronic form. I convert them to both text and PDF files. I grep to find the book(s) that have what I'm looking for, and search individual books using the PDF reader.

If you don't mind my asking, how do you best search through your library of digital technical books? I've got over a couple hundred in my phone and many more in another device and keeping track of bookmarked sections is a hassle sometimes. Also, any particular reading app you recommend?