I get some version of this conversation at least once a month, somebody watching me haul an actual paperback out of my bag and asking, not unkindly, why I don’t just get an e-reader like a normal person, given how much I apparently read. And for years my answer was some vague thing about liking the feel of paper, which is true but also the kind of answer that doesn’t actually explain anything, the sort of thing you say when you haven’t examined the real reason yet.

Here’s the real reason, worked out mostly during a long stretch on Behave earlier this year, an eight hundred page book I needed to flip backward in constantly, rechecking an earlier chapter’s argument against something forty pages later. On paper that’s an unconscious physical action, my thumb just knows roughly where page two hundred is relative to where I am now, some spatial memory I didn’t know I had until I tried to do the same thing on a screen and discovered I had no idea where anything was anymore, just a page number that meant nothing to my hands. Everything on a screen is the same rectangle in the same place. There’s no “the part near the beginning where the spine’s already a little cracked” to navigate by, no physical thickness under my right thumb telling me how much is left before I finish.

I also, and this is the part I’m slightly less proud of admitting, like being visibly interrupted by whether a book is thick or thin before I’ve read a word of it. A paperback tells you something about the commitment you’re making just by existing in your hand, the heft of Thinking Fast and Slow sitting on my nightstand for weeks was its own kind of honest warning that a screen would have quietly hidden behind an identical-looking page count. I like that honesty, even when it’s a little intimidating. An e-reader flattens every book into the same object, and something about that flattening bothers me more than I expected it to when I actually sat down and thought about why.

None of this is really an argument against e-readers as a category, and I try to say that clearly whenever this comes up, because I know plenty of people for whom the portability and the adjustable text size are doing real, important work that paper can’t do for them, and that’s a completely legitimate reason to prefer one. This is a much smaller, much more personal claim: that for me specifically, the physical object is part of how I actually remember and navigate a book, not just aesthetic preference dressed up as principle. I’ll probably keep hauling paperbacks around in a bag that’s too heavy for it, getting the same gentle ribbing about it every few weeks, and I’ve made my peace with that being a permanent, mildly inconvenient feature of how I read rather than a phase I’ll eventually grow out of.