At some point page turning as in physical book becomes an anachronism like the floppy disk icon on save buttons. Do you expect your browser to flip pages upon navigation?
Personally, as much as I like the convenience of digital books, there's nothing quite like the reading experience that comes with a printed physical book.
I spend an inordinate amount of time either turning lights on an off or trying to use the not quite sufficient tablet screen to do stuff.
In my experience, what makes a digital reading app pleasant to use are other things: Responsiveness, choice of default fonts, whether or not it allows the publisher to apply ridiculous style overrides (e.g. forcing the background to be light grey even in night mode), not losing track of pagination at chapter boundaries (so that flipping back across a boundary, paragraphs don't mysteriously shift up or down half a page)...
I'll take a reading app that does these things well, but only uses a simple slide animation over one that imitates a perfect page flip, but otherwise botches the concept of a "page", any day.
Reading from a book however is a better experience than a lit up screen. Audiobooks However have a place as less and less people have the attention span to physically hold something and read it.
To be honest, I would bet that the if younger demographics are reading less paper books it’s because they’re reading less generally rather than switching to digital.
Especially engineering.
Tried conducting an open book test this year and was met with consternation. Had to go with an open laptop test instead.
The human mind is always building models in our minds, based on observations of how things look and work, and then using those models to predict behaviors of things that we are yet to explore. For this to work well, appearance has to imply behavior. Instead of starting with a clean slate each time it would be helpful if we can leverage the mental models we have already built of the physical world. This is where skeuomorphism is helpful.