I went back to print. I required all the students to buy the same edition of the book. Now, when I say, “Please look at the passage on page 45,” everybody opens the book to page 45 and looks at the passage and we have a conversation without getting bogged down in technical glitches.

I know that today’s students are supposed to be digital natives, but in my experience, most students are only good at using basic end-user technology. It’s possible that students don’t know how to use e-readers in class because they don’t use e-books: According to the 2012 Pew Internet & American Life Library Services Study, only 25 percent of Americans 16-29 read at least one e-book in the past year. By contrast, 100 percent of college students know how to use a book. So, in my classes, we use computers for the things that computers are good for, and we use books for the things that books are good for.

It’s important to remember that e-readers have only been around for a few years, so there are dozens of user interface issues that have not been worked out yet. For example: You can’t easily flip through an e-book. In education, this matters more than you think. Let’s say that you were reading a book for class, and you remember seeing something important in a paragraph that you sort of remember was on a page that also had a picture of a fish. You flip through the book, and you see the page, but it’s not a picture of a fish, it’s a picture of a whale. But you found the passage, and you read it again, and you remember it this time. This is how human memory works: You can have a vague sense of something that looked like something, and you go and find it based on what it looked like. It’s not perfect, but it’s effective. Millions of these not-necessarily-linear information-retrieval experiences add up to an education. In an e-book, I couldn’t flip, and I couldn’t search for the phrase “fish picture,” because the picture wasn’t actually a fish. The educational possibilities are limited by the physical realities of the interface.

By contrast, the user interface for a book has been refined for centuries. What we call a ‘printed book’ today is a codex, a set of uniformly sized pages bound between covers. It was adopted around the 3rd or 4th century. A book’s interface is nearly perfect. It is portable, it never runs out of power, and you can write notes in it if you forget your notebook. The physical book is seamlessly integrated into the educational experience: It fits on any desk, even those cramped little writing surfaces that flip up from the side of a seat. You can sit around a table with 15 other people, each of whom has a book, and you can all see each other to have a conversation about what is on the page. If a book breaks, you replace it. If you drop a book in the sink, you dry it out. Paper may even be a better platform for the cognitive task of learning, according to a study by Norwegian professor Anne Mangen. “The ease with which you can find out the beginning, end and everything in between and the constant connection to your path, your progress in the text, might be some way of making it less taxing cognitively, so you have more free capacity for comprehension,” Mangen told Scientific American last year.