As far as novels are concerned, ebooks only have two advantages to me:<p>(1) They save space. If I were a voracious reader devouring many novels, this might actually matter to me. But as it stands, I&#x27;m the sort of person to be into a single novel at a time, and I don&#x27;t make it a point to read fast but rather to read more slowly and enjoy every word. At the same time, there&#x27;s a strange pleasure in assembling little shelves of novels I&#x27;ve read and loved. A Kindle or iBooks library just feels sterile and corporate in comparison.<p>(2) They&#x27;re searchable. For novels, this is not as much of an advantage as I thought it would be, though. The senses of touch and sight are surprisingly powerful at forming a mental index of a novel. Even small things like the passing memory of the relative difference in weight or thickness between the pages on the left and the pages on the right go into helping me remember where a particular passage was. Holding a physical novel in your hands, there&#x27;s a sense of seeing the entire book all at once, almost like a limited form of omniscience. Seeing only a page or two at a time in an ebook in comparison is like tunnel vision.