There was a time when books were only for the ultra-rich because they needed to be hand-copied, manually bound, and so only the rich could afford them. The invention of the printing press radicalized this in that books could now be made cheaper. This process did not stop there, and today books are printed on demand for those who still prefer the smell and feel of a book to the process of reading the same story on a screen.
Is one better than the other? A matter of preference I would say. I see the advantage of preserving books especially from earlier times, and still have a box full of my grandfather's poems in a Dutch dialect that is only still spoken in the province of Zeeland in the Netherlands, which I hope I will get the opportunity to do something useful with.