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Funny how comparisons to pbooks always involve older books, or special collector's editions; nobody talks about the joys of the pulp mmpb--the cracked spine, the curved-back cover that no longer closes flat, the brittle yellowing paper, the tiny text that runs so close to the center margin that you have to break the glue to read it, and then the pages start falling out...
I didn't get into ebooks to replace my letter-sized RPG manuals with the color artwork & detailed charts, nor to replace the hardcover Junior Classics collection I read as a child, nor to replace my signed first edition of The Fifth Sacred Thing. I got into ebooks to replace my dog-eared, torn-corner copies of Spider Robinson's Callahan's series, so I could re-read them at will without worrying about getting crumbs or coffee stains on the pages. To replace the second- and third-hand copies of cheap trashy romance novels I buy at yard sales for fifty cents. To replace the science fiction paperbacks that I used to put clear tape over the edges of the covers so they'd survive multiple readings. To get the classics--Alice in Wonderland, works of Shakespeare, Kipling--in a format my kids could read, highlight, and print out the sections with the poems they like to put in their rooms.
I started reading ebooks to replace throwaway paper editions, not collectibles. To replace the kind of paperbacks that, when my husband was living on the road, he tore out pages of after he'd read them so he wouldn't have to carry as much.
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