I’m yet to hear an argument against ebooks that doesn’t fall back on “but that’s not the way we used to do it” logic in one form or another. I especially loved this:

But I want to go beyond practicality to the reading experience itself, our engagement with the text. What is it that these literary men and women are afraid of losing should the paper novel really go into decline? Surely not the cover, so often a repository of misleading images and tediously fulsome endorsements. Surely not the pleasure of running fingers and eyes over quality paper, something that hardly alters whether one is reading Jane Austen or Dan Brown. Hopefully it is not the quality of the paper that determines our appreciation for the classics.

I’d even argue that this piece doesn’t go far enough, as there are some glaring errors:

Could it be the fact that the e-book thwarts our ability to find particular lines by remembering their position on the page? Or our love of scribbling comments (of praise and disgust) in the margin?…We can’t so easily flick through the pages to see where the present chapter ends, or whether so and so is going to die now or later. In general, the e-book discourages browsing, and though the bar at the bottom of the screen showing the percentage of the book we’ve completed lets us know more or less where we’re up to, we don’t have the reassuring sense of the physical weight of the thing (how proud children are when they get through their first long tome!), nor the computational pleasures of page numbers (Dad, I read 50 pages today). This can be a problem for academics: it’s hard to give a proper reference if you don’t have page numbers.

Ebooks actually make it easier to remember and find particular lines, provide the ability to make notes (and access them remotely), and are a delight for OCD-leaning page number counters, such as myself. And there are features like Amazon X-Ray, which actually further enhances your ability to understand a book.

Oh, and ebooks have page numbers.