There is a specific pleasure in reading a book that has been out of print and hard to find. The search is part of the experience. When I finally found a copy of Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children in a used bookstore after looking for two years, the reading was colored by the difficulty of finding it.

The book is extraordinary — a portrait of a charismatic, monstrous father and the damage he does to his family. It was championed by Randall Jarrell in an introduction that has become more famous than the novel itself. It has been in and out of print over sixty years.

The accessibility of ebooks has made the out-of-print problem less severe, which is mostly good. But there's something about the physical search — the bookstores, the used market, the specific copy with its previous owner's name on the flyleaf — that the ebook can't replicate.