How Piracy Made 'Go the Fuck to Sleep' a No. 1 Amazon Best-Seller

You were perhaps aiming for a sound-bite, but saying "It works in very few cases" is inaccurate.

I'm reading books in my dead time, like the daily commute, and I don't have the luxury to use a notebook. I like marking important paragraphs, or add notes on stuff that was previously defined in former chapters, or add question marks reminding me to do further research online.

And yes, the device has to have a big screen with good resolution, and that screen has to be readable in sunlight. And my problem with E-Ink is that it doesn't come in color (making them useless for reading some topics, like design/photography stuff for example).

Of course, I will be very happy when such technical limitations are removed. And I'll also be very happy that such reading devices are more green, and my reading habits aren't the reason for cutting down forests :)

Having a physical book can help someone focus and get in the mood, as well as help them create the enviroment around the book itself as they consume the contents.

An ipad or computer also has other purposes than reading, but a book does not.

Some people can do this with an ipad or a computer monitor, but I think the people who say there's no replacing a good book might prefer the in-part ritual around reading an actual book.

[edit] You might be right in that people will eventually create these things around their ipad, but I still think there might be a value in, even if not more valuable than having grep for a book, the single-purpose existence of books.

I don't think you're necessarily wrong, maybe is just that us, "book-fetishists", are a dying species :)

Reading your post I thought a little harder about why I wouldn't like physical books to go away, or to be transformed into "souvenirs" (which I think it's pretty much the same as them books going away).

First, like I said, maybe I'm just a "book-fetishist". It's very hard to explain, Borges explained it best when he said that he hopes "Heaven is a library".

Second, and I saw that you wrote about that in your blog post, books do indeed "represent things, places, times, events or ideas to certain people". I know it happens to me very often to just sit in my couch and look through the titles of the books I've accumulated in my personal library. Half of them I haven't even read, but just reading their titles gives you a special feeling.

Last and not least, I still continue to believe that my interest in reading was very much nurtured by me growing in a small apartment filled up with the books that my dad had bought. I kind of hope that my unborn child will inherit the same passion, just because s/he would grow up in a house surrounded by books.