[SubmarineClub]

Another benefit to paper books, in my experience, is it's a lot easier to remember the rough location of a particular passage (towards the front, middle, near the end, etc.) than with digital

A progress bar really doesn't replace the context of the stack of pages behind and ahead of your current page.

[dhosek]

My own personal anecdata on this comes from being able to find a passage I read in a 500-page book in 1992 for a class I was taking in 1998. I could probably even find that same passage now if I were to walk across the room to the bookcase where I have that book.

Although on the other hand, I was also able to turn up an article I’d read online a couple years later when it was relevant to a friend’s relationship with her newly out trans kid, but it was definitely a different sort of recall and lookup happening in the latter case.

[maximilianthe1]

While physical "progress bar" is much easier to remeber than digital one (on the side of the screen for pdfs), because you actually interact with it the whole time, i don't find (ha) finding a particular passage hard without it. I personally usually can remeber a phrase or just a word and search for them in a PDF to find the needed passage.

[UncleOxidant]

It's pretty easy to highlight passages with most e-reader software. Some even let you write a note that goes with the highlight. You can then look through a list of all highlighted passages.

[Tor3]

It's when something comes up and you remember that you read something relevant in the past. In most of those cases it's not about "Ah, this is something I may want to check again at a later time, so let's highlight it". So, there's no list of highlighted passages to search through.

Indeed this is one of those things I miss about paper books. When the above happens I have a terrible time finding that on my Kindle. Most of the time I'm not able to, while with a paper book I didn't have that problem, mostly.