This post is my response to the question, "Hey, How's do you like that Kindle? er... Kooboo? Wait, what's the name of that thing?"
The quote here serves somewhat as inspiration:
ebooks are to actual books as pictures of cats are to actual cats curled & purring in your lap as you read.
— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) January 28, 2013
eBooks will never be replace analog books, and I suspect most avid readers wouldn't think that to be the case. Rather, I've learned through my 18 months with a Kobo that an eReader is a complementary device that allows you to read in different ways. A picture of a cat is a lot easier to take on the subway, for instance, and you could conceivably have take thousands of cat pictures with you on a long journey.
As an avid music listener in addition to an avid reader, the analogy I can reach for is home stereo versus portable music player & headphones. A home stereo likely has superior quality, you can play vinyl records, etc., but it's tough to take with you to work. What you lose in quality and experience is merely shifted to convenience. For someone like me who has high quality headphones and rips CDs as lossless files, the quality difference simply becomes experiential difference.
The basic difference between the formats is effective vs. efficient reading. Analog books allow for more effective reading; I can easily flip through pages both before and after the spot I'm currently reading. It's a non-linear experience. Digital books don't really allow for such a thing, because the reading experience is strictly linear. This has its advantages when you want to digest a text quickly, or if it's material you have already read.
I recently tried reading a chess strategy book on my Kobo, and man, that experience really highlighted these particular shortcomings. Chess books rely quite a bit on use of diagrams, and it was near impossible to flip back to diagrams then go two pages back to where I was reading. Good thing it was a library book, cause I would have been pretty peeved to have spent any amount of money on that book. I had a similar experience after loading seeing how the Pro Tools manual would hold up. It didn't.
So there it is. eReaders aren't necessarily good or bad, unless you're a raging luddite, and it's not like any sane person is going to set fire to their analog book collection any time soon, the same way that iPods aren't going to make most people toss their vinyl in a dumpster. They're different media using different spaces
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