I feel you. Annotating in PDFs is just not the same. I don’t do it generally but I will when I’m really trying to study and learn something, PDFs are not good for that.

I just prefer books generally. There is a certain attunement to reading that happens when holding and looking at a physical book. I can focus better and I can actually read faster with more comprehension and better retainment of information. While reading PDFs my mind wanders more and I want to quickly switch apps to see what’s new on Hexbear, or what someone just texted me, and so on. If I were reading a physical book, my phone would be silenced and facedown so it’s less of a distraction and I better grasp and interiorize what I read. And I just like to collect books, I have a small-to-medium sized personal library and I have a bunch of out of print, difficult to find books which were never digitized. I like to maintain a physical collection of these types of things, like films, as much as possible because one day they may not be possible to find. There is so much wisdom and experience and knowledge in our books and I think we will lose access to many of them sometime soon just because they aren’t profitable to publish and distribute.