As a little girl, I used to love reading books. I read whenever I had free time -- as soon as I got home from school, on long car rides during the summer, right before bed -- you name it. Unfortunately, this stopped when I discovered that the Internet has all these distracting websites on it, at this point, namely Facebook, Buzzfeed, and YouTube (mostly for Buzzfeed and Ellen videos)

I wanted to stop being so addicted to the Internet, so I packed a few books to read during my freshman year at college which I intended to read during my free time, but I found that I would just resort back to social media and YouTube. So, over the summer, I told myself to make a concerted effort to read more. While this didn’t really work while I was at home and had too much time to waste, it did while I was on vacation.

Since my family was traveling quite a distance by airplane, it meant we were in the air for sometimes upwards of 10 hours, even going on one flight that took 16 hours! I wanted to bring some books with me because I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to watch YouTube videos. It was a perfect opportunity to finally get in some long overdue reading time.

However, as fellow book lovers probably know, books -- especially a lot of them -- can get heavy and take up a lot of space which can be troublesome, especially if your family likes to try and travel light, like mine. So, I couldn’t bring as many books as I wanted. However, my sister remembered that we had a Kindle and although it doesn’t really work (the battery doesn’t retain charge), there’s also a Kindle app that we can download on our phones.

At first, I was very reluctant (I’m very pro-print books) and didn’t want to have to resort to reading off my phone; however, I knew it wouldn’t be practical to lug around a bunch of books in my suitcase when I could just buy new ones to read on the Kindle app. Thus, I downloaded the app and a book I’ve been meaning to buy and read for the longest time.

Over the course of the vacation, I found myself reading frequently on the app: in the car, on the subway, back in the hotel room and most definitely on the long plane rides. When I finished the book I had downloaded, we were still on vacation, so I downloaded another one.

Now, as a strong supporter of real, tangible, print books, it pains me to say this, but I realized that there are a lot of benefits to reading on an eBook reader.

For starters, you can bring a lot more books with you wherever you’re going, with an e-reader. You can add as many books to your e-reader library as long as you have the room (and money), and it won’t take up more physical space or become ridiculously heavy; on the other hand, multiple print books can get heavy fast, not too mention that they can take up a lot of space too. E-readers also make the process of buying a book much faster. You just choose the book you want, enter a credit card into the system, click a few buttons and you’re done -- the book will appear in your digital library within a couple of minutes. With print books, you either have to go a store and buy it or -- if you don’t feel like interacting with people -- you can buy it online. However, then you have to wait a couple of days for the book to arrive.

On the flip side, there are plenty of benefits to reading the print versions of books. For starters, you can only read on your e-reader as long as the battery lasts, or you have to plug it in to keep reading. Print books need no charging -- you can read them for as long as you like! Print books are also a lot easier to lend to friends. If you have a favorite book that you think your friend absolutely has to read, you can just grab it from your shelf and lend it to them. (Just make sure it’s a friend who treats books with care -- you don’t want the book to come back with a ripped cover, or worse yet, the corners of pages folded down -- the horror!) However, it’s not so simple to lend a friend an e-book, because then you’d most likely have to lend the whole e-reader.

This last reason is a little hard to explain, but it truly encapsulates why print books are better than e-readers, anytime, any day, hands down. There’s this wonderful feeling of awe when you walk into a bookstore or a library and admire all the books. Yes, e-readers may make reading more readily accessible and convenient, but there’s just something unexplainably awesome about picking up a book and perusing it that makes reading so much better. Reading just feels more ‘real’ and immersive when you read a tangible book, instead of swiping yet another screen. The physical motion of picking up a book, smelling the crispness of ink on paper and flipping through the pages is something unparalleled.

I was in the bookstore the other day, walking up and down the aisles, reading the blurbs on the back cover of books and flipping through them. This sense of nostalgia and excitement washed over me all of a sudden and I turned to my mom and said, “Now I remember why I love to read.”