Sure it does. They need covers to keep clean and avoid problems with the screen. And once you look around, notice how many people put book covers on theirs. Or 'Kindle covers that look like a book cover', for turbo-pedants. A lot of people habitually hold them by the spine, despite reading only on one side (unlike a book) and it not being a 'functional' choice. It was on buttons probably since GUIs were a thing. That's where it started and spread, evolving from typed commands like 'cp x A:\' or some such. Familiarity remained widespread long after the device itself became obsolete, but not necessarily after function. The OP said that. I don't need the article explained, but justified. OK, I can understand liking a callback. I'd be partial to use 'vestigial' over 'atavistic', but you do you.A Kindle doesn't look much like a book,
The floppy disk is not the predecessor of the save button
they existed together for many years and the button image persists because it is a familiar way to represent an abstract concept.
These are called dentils because they resemble teeth.
I think they look nice, and it's interesting that they are now decorative elements with an atavistic function, like the non-closing shutters on the front of my house.
I understand the point of the article to be that it's interesting when artifacts evolve and previously functional elements are retained for a purely decorative purpose. I take your point to be that it's not so interesting. Consider that a typical Kindle contains dozens of books, so it is more like a bookshelf than a single book. The original design intent was for the device to "get out of the way and disappear so you can enter the author’s world." The display may have a page-turning animation, or a dog-ear icon indicating a bookmark, or adjustable margins, but outside of the reading interface I don't see book-like structural features, certainly not a spine to hold the pages together and display the title while the book is shelved. A cover is a functional accessory "to keep clean and avoid problems with the screen" and not a merely decorative replacement for a formerly functional element. Hardback books have dust jackets that also have a functional purpose: to protect (and decorate) the book. I don't see the relevance of the floppy disk or save button. Storage media has evolved considerably, from flexible plastic disks to hard platters in metal enclosures, shiny CD-ROMs and DVDs, and now solid state flash memory. At no point was a previously functional element retained for decorative purposes. The GUI happened to become popular when the 3.5-inch disk was in service, the save button adopted that image as an icon and has not evolved since. Indeed, that must be why I was looking for dentils in my photo, but I forgot by the time I got to the nitpick-Devac stage. "Vestigial" is probably a better fit, but it implies uselessness so maybe we are stuck with "skeuomorphic."The OP said that.