> Buyers and sellers alike pointed to the same reason: growing up in the digital age has intensified the desire for analogue objects and tangible connections to the past. There is something special about holding history in your hands.

Books don't change. The online written word is subject to revision and change, as are ebooks. A physical volume which one owns and holds cannot be memory-holed.

I've even considered printing off essays from the internet I find insightful. I want to reread them, read them in bed, preserve them for the future. Archive.org does exist, but everything on the internet seems to be ephemeral.

I feel like most of these types of beliefs are in the realm of people's desires to differentiate themselves rather than anything intrinsic about how they do it.

There's studies on mammal populations, and as their preferred number of group sizes increases, the 'differentiable' traits also increased. So mammals that preferred to live in large groups had more visible differences in phenotypes than small groups.

If social systems are just an extension of phenotypes to some degree, then all that's really happening is people wanting to differentiate and they have a small differentiable desire in any given direction.

but you be you.

also r/datahoarder

The problem with ebooks to me is that they have no real physical presence (obviously) and therefore I have a harder time remembering if I read them, and where I read them.

On the other hand I have a ton of physical books on my shelf, and can specifically look at one, remember what it’s about, and where I read it. The book itself is a kind of memory totem, and over time I’ve built up a nice little physical collection of what I’ve “emptied into my mind”, to quote Franklin.

I don’t have the same thing for the ebooks I’ve read, and it gives me a weird feeling of amnesia.

Im just contemplating that the cultural filter function that was the recognition of a work by the pulic is deactivated. Even a book that just drowns without any splash may reincarnate as an "idea" from the training material. Yes, the author is forgotten, but the idea lives on.

I didn't know I was part of a trend, that's pretty cool. I've been buying originals related to the Portuguese Estado Novo and Carnation Revolution for some years. A ton of ad-hoc, clearly political, publishers spawned right after the revolution and I've been thinking of digitizing some of the stuff I have for historical purposes.

Personally, I don’t see any advantage of a real book over an ebook (locally stored) in an e-ink reader. And there are disadvantages: ergonomics, space, cost, environment.

EDIT: books last longer (decades or centuries) than SSDs. But M-DISCs can allegedly last for millennia.

I wouldn't be surprised if it has a lot less to do with "seeking tangible connections to the past", and much more with the fact that there are a few book collecting Youtubers who's short form content is getting popular and shows how much people can theoretically earn with old books.