I stayed at an Airbnb that had fake books on the shelves! I looked them up and they aren't even especially cheap. But they probably get stolen a lot less.

I don't know whether to call it fetishism, which has a negative undertone to me.

But I do love physical books. Even unimposing books, I like reading them but also touching them, their smell, their covers. And for art books, I think it goes without saying that the experience of the digital version is markedly different to the physical version.

I love going to a used books store and simply perusing their shelves, occasionally buying something, and a digital library simply cannot replicate this.

For how many thousands of years were books equivalent to absurd wealth. Kings might own a book, or several. Libraries were amazing, but places never seen by the proles and serfs. Thousands of years is a duration more than long enough to give our species some instinctual reverence for the object, reverence that is only reinforced by what we learn from an early age about those. And it's not just the wealth, at least for some sizable fraction of the population, we come to know books as things of knowledge and power, so slurring them as mere commodities is low-handed.

Books are, I think, in some small way, sacred. And I don't want to associate with people who think otherwise. I don't think you get it at all.