Every article comparing digital and physical manga ends the same way: it depends on your preference. That is technically accurate and also completely useless. So I am going to try to be more specific about when each format is actually the better choice, based on what I have noticed after doing both for years.
Digital wins on three things, clearly: price, availability, and portability. Legal digital platforms, particularly services like Shonen Jump USA subscription at $2.99 per month for an enormous library, are genuinely hard to argue against on value. You get access to ongoing series and a back catalog that would cost hundreds of dollars to build physically. If your main goal is to read as much as possible for as little money as possible, digital is the right call and the math is not close.
Availability matters more than most people admit. Some manga has never had a physical English release and probably never will. Other series go out of print and become expensive. For anything outside the mainstream Western market, digital is often the only legal option that does not require importing Japanese volumes you cannot read.
Portability is not just convenience. If you commute, travel, or read in places where carrying multiple books is impractical, a tablet or phone with a reading app is a real advantage. I have read entire arcs on planes that I would not have gotten through otherwise because I was not going to pack eight volumes in a carry-on.
Physical wins on something harder to quantify but real: the reading experience for certain kinds of manga. Art-forward series, anything where page layout is doing structural work, anything drawn with the detail level of Vagabond or Berserk, reads better on paper. The page is the right size. Nothing is compressed. You can see what the artist actually drew.
There is also what I think of as the ownership effect. I reread physical volumes. I almost never reread digital manga, even series I loved. The object on the shelf prompts the revisit in a way the icon in an app does not. If you care about rereading things, physical has a practical advantage that has nothing to do with sentimentality.
The middle path most experienced readers land on is roughly: digital for trying things, physical for the series that stuck. Subscribe to a digital service, read broadly, and when something becomes a series you know you will want to own and revisit, buy it in print. This keeps costs reasonable and avoids the trap of buying physical volumes for a series you ended up not finishing.
The one thing I would push back on is the idea that physical manga is a luxury or an affectation. The format was designed for it. Manga was printed before it was digitized. Reading it on paper is not nostalgia. It is the original experience.
