[Barty]

I do think pbook have some advantageous characteristics. Easier to flip back and forth through pages. You build a mental map of where certain things are and you can flip to them by feel and visual scanning. E-readers have bookmarks and search that are more precise yet at the same time not necessarily as quick and intuitive. Also pbook have richer formatting and show more on a page that what you get on a 6in reader or tablet. You get more context. As someone said up thread, sometimes when I pick my kindle I don't know what I'm reading for a few seconds. Have to tap to bring up the title.

All these don't matter so much with novels, at least not the difficult ones. But for textbooks, paper is still generally better for me. Oh, and pdfs , still used for complex formatting, are an abomination.

There was an earlier study that showed that reading with an ugly or difficult font actually aided comprehension, possibly because you have to concentrate more. I think maybe the relative ease of reading linear narrative text broken into smaller chunks to fit on an e-reader screen, with font face and size of your choice, lets you glide over the text and lulls you into thinking you are absorbing more than you are. It's like listening to a skilled speaker can fool you into believing they are making a coherent argument even if they're just spouting gibberish.