I'd agree with this take. I love reading physical books to learn new subject areas. It's one of my favorite things to do period, as a hobby. Lie down in bed with a physical book & have someone tell you the most important things they learned in life, organized into chapters.

For research I think it's good to use a mix. You won't get good "unknown unknowns" if all you do is search for facts. Some reading of articles and books is good.

I agree on the less distractions part. But it's just a time thing. I can search 7 different books in the time it would take me to get one off a shelf and search it.

I've found that somewhat unexpectedly sometimes physical is faster for search.

With a physical book I might remember that the equation I'm looking for was near the bottom of a series of equations on the bottom half of a left hand page, and the right hand page had a particular graph, and this was somewhere in the third quarter of the book.

It is then just a matter of quickly fanning through that general region of the book to find it.

With digital I can do a digital search but it is hard to find search terms that don't return a ton of hits all through the book. As I read a digital book I don't get a sense of movement through it that I get from a physical book, so I'm less likely to be able to remember how far into the book what I seek should be.