But a book is neither searchable, nor easily copyable. :/

I would focus a little differently from the folks talking about the technological copies that are possible. Copying people and things is just somewhat natural for people to do. And yes, you can somewhat copy a performance that you see.

But that is far far harder to judge your progress and ability on compared to copying a text over and seeing if you can keep the same structure and rhythm. The proliferation of cameras have changed this some, of course. But it used to be a thing that you would try and rewrite from memory some poems that you were studying for school.

Oddly, what is really killing this, I think, is the new idea that so much in life should be permanent. Notebooks are where you think outloud and you should expect most of your thoughts to be transient and not worry about holding on to them. Computers completely break that with people wanting a permanent and indexed collection of all of their thoughts.

I guess the latter depends on your standards for "ease" and the former your ability to find an "index"

OCR exists, and the vast majority of new books are developed on computers and are available in a searchable and copyable format. Ebook software for research and collaboration is not as developed as software purely for linear reading, but there's no huge blockers.

Ebooks are