Just imagine going before a hiring board and dropping a stack of logbooks on the counter; tattered ones, with reinforced spines because they fell apart along the way, with stains and wear and a bit of character, and photos glued here and there documenting this or that, every medical ever issued glued in the back of each log, and more than enough detail to vet anything any which way from sunday. Imagine going into that interview and having someone in that interview, in the time allotted, with the capability of finding a math error in that pile. Good luck with that.

Any more, if I interview, which I do from time to time, usually I'm told they don't need to see my logs, but if offered, it's never more than a cursory glance. With applications that ask for detailed breakdowns by aircraft model and type and specifics with PIC in IMC while eating a banana and scratching one ear with the left elbow, good luck rummaging through that stack of logbooks to piece it together. Truth be told, either the employer believes the breakdown I put on the application, or they don't, but they're not going to go rooting through that pile to ferret out the amount of time spent over the north atlantic in July during a solar flare while eating the fish and carrying on a conversation about Pluto. If they are, I want to work for those guys, because they're my hero's, right after Ace Ventura, Pet Detective.

If someone asks for a breakdown on my logbooks, I'm going to give them the best I can come up with, which will be reasonably close. I meet all the minimums, check all the boxes, and if I can't fly by now, then I need to go be an apprentice doing dresser drawer dovetail joints, or ivory tester in a piano factory. I don't think the employer really much cares if I have x.x hours or xx.x hours, or xx,xxx.x hours in type in IMC at night while IRO. If the employer does care, the employer can find out quickly by asking the former employer. The times listed add up to turbine, or to PIC, or to time spent in yellow airplanes, but they do add up. If the employer wants to dissect the logbook to see if it's down to the tenth, then great googly moogly. Impressive. In the end, the employer knows that they're not hiring the Yeager Himself, and they're not hiring the Ace of the Base (or the Ace of Base, as case may not be); they're hiring a warm body that checks the boxes and kept an account of the flying along the way.

Usually if the employer flips through a logbook, they may find an interesting photo, and we'll spend our time talking about that, before moving on.

If someone has the bare minimum time, then it's fairly easy to sort through, especially if they have a minimal number of aircraft types and former employers.

If someone has a stack of logbooks that are decades old and past worn out, then dividing that applicant's time down to the nth degree isn't really the priority, and frankly, some of us would rather spend time with the grandkids than devote pointless time to the tedium of trying to load that worn out pile of stained paper into a computer program...where one is even more likely to create errors along the way.

Paper logbooks still work just fine. The license never runs out, it doesn't matter if the world has a format change, no power is required, no program is required to run them, they don't need to be reprinted, they're not affected by magnets, and have no hard drives to fail.