This essay by Crag Mod asks the question, “will digital books ever replace print?” Call it a state-of-digital-books referendum. Beautifully written and digitally bound.

To read a book once is to know it in passing. To read it over and over is to become confidants. The relationship between a reader and a book is measured not in hours or minutes but, ideally, in months and years.

Recently, a hardcover of Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire was gifted to me. Because I rarely read in print these days (other than magazines), I bought the book from Apple as well. The idea is that I don’t have to wait until some imagined future where I make time to read the books on my side table every night, I can just read the thing anytime. A dual-platform experiment — one not quite undertaken in Mod’s essay, but perhaps a best-of-both worlds approach, for now.