yesterday, i started talking about books. 15 minutes later i was still talking about books
are inconvenient and frustrating. they close automatically and most of them ask you to have 4 spare hands to keep them open while reading. hardback books are worse about this. the way they tend to be bound causes them to be actively fighting your will to read them. softback books are easier to keep open and read but they sustain damages much more easily and the spot you're holding eventually just gets sweaty and uncomfortable
packets provide an interesting solution to the problems posed by books. for all usability concerns, packets are superior. they don't close against your will, they don't require you to be making any physical contact with them while reading, unless they're bound particularly poorly it's always possible to read all the text on the page, they don't double in size when read, etc. but packets are the glass cannon build of physical text media. with no cover and while still being made of the same environmentally-weak paper as the content of a book, packets are at threat of damage perpetually. without this fault, they would be the clear winner of this hypothetical contest, but now i'm not so sure.
but there do exist alternative options to reading text in real life. we could be writing text on walls. this is obviously an issue if you want to send someone a copy of a written work or access the text in a few thousand years. we could be writing text on tablets. it worked for people roughly 5000 years ago. solid tablets actually do have some things going for them. they're the most weather resistant of the portable options. they're actually just the most resistant in general. maybe less information would've been lost in the burning of the library of alexandria if they used tablets. obviously tablets have serious problems, though. they're bulky and harder to hold and heavier for transportation and storage. they're more difficult to produce and the amount of margin where text cannot be placed on a tablet is massive. if you're writing on a tablet and a mistake is made, fixing that mistake will be particularly difficult. tablets are not the solution for modern needs
scrolls are another alternative from antiquity. they're much like packets but they're harder to use and waste a huge amount of space. for most scrolls, the air between the paper takes up tens of times as much space as the paper itself. creating a long text is difficult with a scroll. you have two options: make the scroll longer and longer and longer again or make the words smaller and smaller and smaller again. there is also the secret third option that we tend to do with other mediums anyway: split the text into multiple volumes. scrolls also have problems with damage since they're just a packet but with more surface area for things to go wrong. scrolls sortof live on today in the form of posters, except that instead of ancient wisdom and incantations we have advertising and propaganda
the conclusion i draw is that you'd better not want a decent and manageable method of storing text if you're amish