I want to be clear up front that this isn’t a superiority thing, I’m not going to tell you paper is morally better than a screen or that people who read exclusively on a tablet are missing something essential about literature, because that’s nonsense and I don’t actually believe it. I own an ereader. It was a gift, it works fine, I’ve read entire novels on it without incident. And I still reach for it maybe four times a year, always specifically when I’m traveling and don’t want to carry three hardbacks in a bag that already has a laptop in it, and every single time there’s a small, specific friction I can’t get around, no matter how many times I try to argue myself out of it.

It’s the margin. Not the metaphorical margin, the actual physical white space at the edge of a printed page, where I make a small mark, a check, a bracket around a sentence I want to find again, a single word in pencil that means something only to me six months later when I flip back through. That space doesn’t really exist the same way on a screen. Sure, there’s a highlight function, there’s a notes feature, I’ve used both, and neither one produces the thing I actually want, which is a specific pencil mark in a specific physical location that I can find again by muscle memory alone, flipping pages with my thumb until my hand just knows where it is before my eyes catch up.

I think this is directly downstream of the job, if I’m being honest about it, nine years of making the exact same kind of mark on a manuscript page for money has apparently rewired something in how I read for pleasure too. The margin isn’t decoration for me. It’s part of how the book and I actually talk to each other. A highlight on a screen is a flat yellow rectangle that exists nowhere in particular. A pencil mark in the margin of a paperback is a specific, physical, slightly embarrassing record of exactly what I was thinking at exactly that point in the story, misspellings and all.

None of this means the ereader is bad or that digital reading doesn’t count, somebody’s going to read this and think I’m being precious about it, and maybe I am a little. But there’s a reason the stack by my bed is always paper and the ereader lives in a drawer between trips, fully charged, mostly unused, waiting for the one week a year I need to pack light. I’ll take the extra weight in my bag over losing the margin. That trade isn’t close for me, not anymore, not after nine years of the same pencil doing the same job on two different kinds of pages.