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I think that for a lot of people, what they read and how they read it isn't a meaningful experience. MP3 players were taken up by music geeks for years before they went mainstream, and the same thing has happened with the ereader. The more-casual music listener was rarely the early adopter for MP3 hardware. Once the ipod took the device to the tipping point, there was mass adoption.
I don't know that quite the same pattern will apply to ereaders. I don't see casual readers buying into the device en masse; that is, I don't see "I can carry around all of my ten books I've had since high school" being a strong market force. I do think there are book geeks who are traditionalists, but they'll mostly die off, convert, or become the vinyl music "collectors" of the book industry.
What is ironic, though: Technophile book-geeks making smoochie smoochie noises at their Kindles while mocking the irrational Luddism of paperback geeks who argue the affordances and enchantments of paper-based books... and then bemoaning DRM issues, PDF display features, collection management failures and so on, between exchanging blows in the neverending iPad-eReader war that never really happened.
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