You've received several answers on the "quality" side due to books being harder to create, but I'll cover two more arguments:
1. Nobody's "reading the internet" anymore, especially not on their phones. They're mindlessly scrolling short-form video, either muted or blasting them really loud with no headphones, if my experience of Spanish subway is accurate.
2. Even if all books were just printed directly from random internet pages, and there was zero difference in quality, it would be a huge step-up to go from reading one internet page at a time, to focusing on the same content for 200+ pages in a row. There is huge value in giving ourselves the longer attention span.
Even as hyperbole it's too extreme.
Walk around in the subway someday and count, out of 100 people, how many are reading on their phone vs scrolling. I have not seen a person read an article or book on their phone in ages.
Yes they exist but even Google is making it harder to find content to read by burying text-based pages below AI summaries and video results.
Myself I have an e-ink reader but almost always take a paper book on the subway. It's still better quality print, not fragile in any way that matters, and I don't have to think about charge or aging electronics. I only bring the e-reader for manuals and such that change too often to be worth the paper cost, but still miss the old coding manuals with their ad-hoc page sizes, the spatial sense of where the information was in a book was part of the memory anchoring.
It's not all that odd to me. The barrier of entry to getting something printed and published is much, much, higher than putting something online, which effects the quality quite a bit.
Obviously there are complete wastes of paper out there in terms of published books, but as a generalisation it's not odd to presume a printed book is going to be of higher quality than a webpage.
Printing has its moat, yes, which better protects it from copying, and process of consuming from interruptions, and creates payment in advance situation. Printing houses produce enormous amounts of cliche-by-cliche semi-porn "romantic novels", and various sensationalist garbage, and earn money without suffocating dependency on Google, FB and such. Good for them.
Even low-quality books have words people might not know. I often find people who don't read books (physical or eBook) have a much lower vocabulary, and they typically don't value vocabulary, which as an avid reader, I find weird, but I guess to each their own.
We should 100% ban all smart devices for people under 18. Not just in schools but entirely. Middle schoolers literally can’t spell their own names, or words like “want” and “cat”. I would have assumed some of the teachers were pearl-clutching but it’s not just a few of them saying this, it’s all of them, including my own mom who I trust a lot.
That's a weird take. The internet has basically no barriers. Book publishing, with all of its many flaws, does. Anyone can technically self publish a book, but the odds that you'll find someone on the subway reading it are small. So odds are the book you see people reading on transit is on average better than an internet content.
* give or take some years