Any time I need a book, I know I have several great ones to choose from.
So I think the advent of digital books[1] transformed my 積ん読 from a huge and ugly pile of heavy artifacts — that ultimately had to be sold at a yard sale in 2005 ($1 for all 3 gigantic hardback volumes of Comer's Internetworking with TCP/IP!!), with the remainder ending up in a landfill — into an invisible, weightless trove of knowledge and entertainment.
I haven't bought a paper book since I bought a paperback copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance at an airport, just before the airplane rules changed to allow reading electronically even during takeoff and landing.
But I also spend twice the money (or maybe even ten times the money) that I used to -- but that's because I buy way more books. I tend to google for books I think I might like when I am drunk late at night, and I also buy any book which somebody I know forcefully recommends.
[1]: I mean what Amazon did: making almost all books available in convenient[2] digital form. I read digital books on my Newton and Palm devices back in the old days (1990s, Peanut Press and others, but the selection was extremely limited
[2]: convenient if you don't care about removing the DRM, which I usually don't, since I rarely read a book more than once
EDIT: Here's a visual representation:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/om9xdox53rcl1g9/Screenshot%202015-...
Some of the notably awesome books on that screen: The Son, Spin (and really, almost anything by Robert Charles Wilson, but especially Spin), The Dog Stars, Blindsight and Echopraxia, Station Eleven, Seveneves and REAMDE, Nightwoods.
Bonus: gut-wrenchingly awful books I started reading and aborted (or worse, read to the end on the misguided hope that somehow they would redeem themselves): California, The Buried Giant, Avogadro / A.I. Apocalypse, Wool, Mr. Mercedes, Terms of Enlistment.
Probably half of them I still have not read.