You Should Know

Well, when I was a kid my favorite things where always electronics, TV, radio, music, so if I had children I would never deprive my children of electronics, no matter what the “experts” say.

Not electronics, screens. My kid has lots of music and electronic toys, just not a tablet or smartphone to play with independently (yet). And it's not about deprivation, it's about moderation. The screen moratorium is mostly for children under age 3 or 4 as very young children are pure hedonists and they lack emotional regulation and impulse control.

Well, I have to disagree on this one, if I’m dealing with complicated texts where I need to quickly refer to multiple sections then nothing beats being able to crtl + f. Also scrolling is much faster than turning pages. But I guess it can be a personal thing.

I concede that this heavily determined by personal flow and I even noted that point in my original comment. I think both our perspectives on this are valid, but I just wanted to clarify that by "complicated texts," I mean texts where you need to have immediate or quick access to jump back and forth between sections e.g. scholarly editions or books like House of Leaves that are literally "complex text."

Yes you can lend a book from a library, but in my experience libraries never have anything worth reading...

This may be determined by the libraries that you have access to, but where I live I can get almost any in print book from my library. Granted, I can't get it immediately, but through inter-library loan, I get a lot of books that aren't in my local libraries' collections that I would otherwise have to purchase. The main thing is to have a reading queue and place requests in advance which, I admit, is its own skill. My neighborhood is also full of the little free libraries that the original thread is in reference to, which have been a great source of free books (I also give away books to the free libraries, too).

I think you are also greatly exaggerating the technical skills needed to download a book, sometimes even just searching “book name pdf download” is enough to download a book, which can be done on a smartphone that most people already own.

I'm not exaggerating at all. Sure, it is easy at face value, but it really does assume a lot of preexisting digital literacy and technical knowledge. We might be reaching a point where enough people have these skills from youth, but older generations are still lacking a lot basic tech literacy.

...buying a physical book online or lending it from a library also means the book is registered to the reader’s name electronically, in this case tied to the user’s real name and payment details.

Okay, so two things here:

1. I'm not talking about privacy regarding purchasing goods online (good point, but that's a different privacy concern), I'm talking about the privacy ecosystem on the device itself e.g. bloatware infested tablets, proprietary walled-garden e-readers, and apps that exist to collect data and serve ads.
2. All libraries in the United States, at least for now, are very protective of patron data. Some libraries even regularly purge the check-out history. Bullet three of the America Library Association's code of professional ethics even states: "We protect each library user's right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or received and resources consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted." It's baked into the modern library profession to protect the patron's privacy. I haven't heard of any entity or group hacking (or subpoenaing) public libraries for check-out history other than the Federal government.

Now I actually favor reading on a screen...

You might be a monster. 😂