Today I will extol the virtues of paper books (aka "dead tree" book) in one particular domain: language learning. Specifically, I'll be looking at language learning materials for the purposes of reading.
Wanting nice stuff
Briefly I was wanting an e-ink display; it seems that some cool new things are being developed such as,
Rather than being a hero for the economy and immediately buying stuff, I decided to turn my attention to many of the things I already have and see how I could make better of these things rather than seeking new things.
This was done while shuffling some displays/peripherals/etc.; a similar spirit to fussing with (physical) config to make things nicer.
Advantages of paper for language learning
I got a bunch of reference materials for language learning in paper format. Do check out my various pages on languages if you haven't done so already!
Typesetting
Often, paper publications will contain fancy typesetting that is helpful for learning purposes and not usually present on resources like websites. For beginner to intermediate learners especially these things are helpful to have.
In Japanese, paper publications aimed at learners (e.g. children, weebs) will often contain furigana, pronunciation marks over words. Now, you can automate a similar function pretty well using browser extensions or with the aid of a pop-up dictionary (like Rikaichamp for Firefox). However, sometimes these tools can give ambiguous or incorrect results—nothing beats manual annotation (it is like having an authoritative native speaker by your side).
Similar things exist in other languages. For instance in Russian, texts for learners often label accent (e.g. accented Ру́сский язы́к "Russian language" vs the normal orthography Русский язык). Arabic only marks long vowels usually; short vowel markings will annotate texts for learners.
Having these annotations readily available in learning means you can spend more time language learning and less time fussing with tooling. By having resources available to conveniently learning things correctly the first time as you are exposed, you can save time in the long run.
Multi-booking
Some of the aforementioned advantages can also be found in PDF books.
However, nothing beats having a bunch of paper books open and your computer and other stuff.
Books are like... little high quality ink displays. You can have a bunch of "displays" set up—a dictionary, a grammar reference, and some text you are trying to work through.
"Well", someone might say, "one advantage of using a computer/PDFs is having your entire library on demand". Sometimes, this is good. But often for intense study I find I don't really need or make use of this advantage. At any given time, how many hours are you going to spend over N books?
Paper books mean setting things up to see all the info you need right at once.
Portability/Robustness
This heading is relatively self-explanatory. Books don't need batteries. You can ad-hoc upgrade them with annotations, book covers, and more. Books are often not so expensive to replace if stuff goes bad.
Final thoughts
The advantages of digital materials are readily understandable for people that make daily use of them. Particularly nice are things like search functionality, indexing, and other features that require manual lookup in paper books.
One question to ask is where is the bottleneck of my learning? I've found that just contemplating some key term while fumbling through an index has in fact been helpful for helping me remember concepts. Thumbing through a dictionary has helped me discover things about languages I would not have otherwise seen if I had enjoyed near instantaneous results.