Ever since the invention of e-books, physical copies have been greatly affected. With the electronic version of a book, many people saw this as a way to save money since the cost was conveniently cheaper compared to a printed copy. As you can probably guess, this lead to the fall in sales in printed books.

As a lover of books myself, who wouldn’t want to get books for the lowest price possible? It is not cheap to have a love for books accumulating on your bookshelves.

But nothing beats having a physical copy in your hands. It’s just not the same.

At the end of the day it might just be me who feels that way about books, but all I know is that I will never stop buying printed versions, no matter how popular the electronic ones get.

For a couple years now I have been hearing about how physical copies are in the risk of becoming a thing of the past. Well, I think not. Although printed versions of books did happen to suffer through a phase of continuous downfall from the years of 2009 through 2012, starting 2013 the sales began to rise a little more each year, according to Statista.

On top of that, as printed books rose in sales, electronic versions began to fall. If that’s not printed books making a comeback, I don’t know what is.

Not only are printed versions better due to the connections readers make toward them, but there are actual studies on why printed versions are better, like the study conducted by researchers from Harvard Medical School for starters. Their study shows that reading an electronic book before bed can affect your health in a negative way.

Anne-Marie Chang states: “Participants reading an LE-eBook took longer to fall asleep and had reduced evening sleepiness, reduced melatonin secretion, later timing of their circadian clock and reduced next-morning alertness than when reading a printed book.”

These researchers took 12 participants and conducted a two-week study where the participants read electronic versions of books for four hours before bed every night, for a total of five days. Next, the same process was repeated with printed versions. Some participants began by reading the printed version first, other began with the electronic version. At the end, the results showed that those who read the electronic version had a harder time falling asleep, among other negative impacts.

In addition to that, this study made me think of all the times I struggled to fall asleep in the past. Every time I struggled to fall asleep, I would pick up whatever I was currently reading and somehow managed to sleep peacefully after reading a chapter or two, depending on length. This makes me believe that this study is in fact, correct. Others would probably resolve to picking up their devices and checking their notifications and such which could further disrupt your ability to fall asleep.

Furthermore, when you have an electronic version of a book, you can’t truly focus on it completely. You might get distracted with the notifications you receive while reading which will lead you to jump in and out of the book. Then, at the end of the night, you won’t get any reading done because you were too focused on opening up each notification you received. To make matters worse, you probably won’t even be able to recall what it is you had just read.

Personally speaking, whenever I read a book, I like to fully dive into it with no distractions. As an avid reader, I love being part of the journey that the books story tells. No matter how popular the electronic versions get, they will never have the same impact on me that printed books do.