I’ve always loved physical books, and the serendipitous discoverability of volumes on a shelf can’t be beat.

That said, ebooks provide worthwhile benefits in their own right. Fulltext search, text‐to‐speech, changing fonts and font sizes, small physical size convenient for travel… other times I come up with some operation I want to perform on a particular book, like counting how often a particular phrase is used, or comparing certain passages side by side, where having an ebook copy would be useful.

So for these reasons, I often buy the ebook edition of my hardcopy books, if I can find it DRM‐free. Similarly, after reading a good ebook I’ll often get a physical copy to stash on my shelf. (In any case, though, DRM‐encumbered ebooks are off the table, at least for me!)

Makes me wish for a well‐made book scanner and OCR package, so I can format shift all those physical books I can’t find acceptable ebooks of.

For me it's the absence of an affordable automated page turner that makes this conversion difficult. I have an Auramate from Czur (https://www.czur.com/) which does a pretty good job of the scanning and OCR (about 2 sec per page or double page) and corrects for curvature at the spine. However I have zero experience with other equivalent machines which are undoubtedly available.

If I bought physical books of everything I read I would run out of space in my apartment. I already have so many books, so I started only buying physical books if I felt like they contain a lot of pictures or are pleasing physical objects. For general reading kindle books being available on demand without going to a bookshop or waiting on postage, that my partner can read the same book at the same time, and it being lightweight for commuting are all also nice perks but the space saving is the key element for me