> your brain maps physical properties of the book to actual content
Any resources detailing this? It's the first I've heard of it.
> Besides, no e-reader today can let your riffle through pages as fast as paper book.
True, though the iPad is actually somewhat faster than a physical book, in my experience.
> you have to wait for visual feedback (screen refreshing).
At least in my experience, the time required to flip a page is at least identical to (greater than, in most cases) that of a modern e-reader showing the next page.
> With paper books things are at the tip of your fingers.
> E-reader have more friction.
I simply can't agree with this. A well indexed ebook is easy to follow cross references in (such as footnotes), you can do an actual search on the content, and the lack of weight is something that can't be understated.
A specific example: I went through the "Physically Based Rendering" book a few years back. I simply can't understate how painful it was to deal with the physical book. It was the size of a large text book (it was a large textbook), heavy enough it never left my desk. More specifically, it was always flat on the desk, making it difficult to read.
It also had glossy pages that, to this day, want to stick together (not to mention being challenging to write on). Finding content in it that wasn't a chapter title included going to a glossary with a ton of page numbers, and flipping back and forth constantly (see comment about sticky pages) to see if page N was the one I was looking for.
There was no 'proprioception' between myself and the book, there was no convenience, there was only inconvenience. Even the authors recognized this, providing a digital copy of most of the code so you wouldn't spend all day typing code.
An e-reader version of the book could only have provided a better experience.