- It's fun to collect, to look at what you have.
- You can remember the books, by looking at your shelves.
- You /actually/ own something, instead of some random variable in Jeff Bezos' database saying you are /allowed to/ read it.
This article is about academic libraries. Research in many fields requires keeping multiple books open in front of you at the same time, because new research typically starts by synthesizing disparate previous research. That’s a workflow that most people find much less efficient with ebooks. Your segue into personal book ownership and impressing people is also not very relevant to the article.
From experience, when a college library offers access to an ebook, what they do is just providing an access token so you can log into some publisher's website and read it there. The publisher can theoretically withdraw a book or raise the price and the library will have no recourse because it doesn't own them.
If everything is locked up in ebooks with DRM (Amazon recently nuked old Kindles to close a DRM loophole), culture is locked behind corporate paywalls.
Yes, that's what funds the creation of culture. If intellectual property is unprotected, then creators of that property are not supported.
>DRM
You're downloading them wrong.