Kuala Lampur, April 15 -- Recently, with all the hype about The Three-Body Problem on Netflix , I decided to buy Cixin Liu's first book in the trilogy.

When I shared a photo of the book on WhatsApp, I was duly reminded of how rare a species I seem to be.

At least two of my friends said they quit buying physical books; nowadays they only read books on Kindle or download PDFs and just read on their devices.

The situation is even more pronounced when it comes to non-fiction.

At my university where I've been working almost three years, I swear I have not seen a single physical textbook being held by any student.

This is nothing short of amazing considering how, decades ago, folks like me used to queue up at the college library to reserve...