Does anyone read books anymore? I recently went to the university Library I went to 15yrs back and I was shocked to see how few students were reading books. Most were on their laptops presumably reading from e books.
No. Not a single person has read a paper book in the last 15 years. If you go into a book store right now and see someone buying a book with cash, then you can be sure they are a mule for a money laundering operation.
The people in public spaces that are "reading books", the pages are actually all blank. They are paid actors employed by Big Publishing to keep the facade up that they are legitimate businesses, and are not just fronts for laundering money for drug cartels and the like.
They are all in on it, and you better keep quiet, or they will be on to you.
As a student (or even researcher), you often gets these papers from similarly "questionable" websites because the typical university subscription for academic journals is not as encompassing as you need it for your studies/work.
Few wrote read textbooks, they are often used as reference or worked from. But textbooks can form a through line or a framework to guide you through a subject in a bespoke way - as pictured by an expert or team of experts.
Try a non-university library, an airport, a beach, a coffee shop, poolside, or any number of other places, but university libraries are for studying and doing homework, not usually reading books.
They are very very big blocks of plaintext in sequential order. There’s only so many things books are good at. I’ve seen people buy paper books for classes with open book exams where ebooks are allowed and that’s just a mistake.
I feel as ebook technology improves just a tad from where it is today so we get some great large format color I’m probably going to stop buying books to save my wallet and I feel long term the physical book will become a novelty and picked up by hipsters in the same fashion as vinyl.
This also makes it harder for my kids to read. Too many screens, games and youtube, and they just don't want to read from paper. My oldest at least reads some manga online.