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Paper books will last at least fifty years, as long as I'm willing to not abuse them. Generally, if they don't last that long, it's my fault. With e-books, there's another party involved in keeping them accessible for long periods of time, and it's not in their economic interest to hold up their end of the bargain. Any book you bought can be re-read and is competition for your reading time. It costs them money to keep your book accessible to you on new devices, and at some point, it will make business sense to cut their losses and not allow that book to be transferred to a new device. The question is, when does that point occur? Well before fifty years, I would wager. And once you can't transfer it, it will only last as long as your current e-reader (i.e. five years if you're really lucky). Of course, there will be bankruptcies, changes of publishing ownership, DRM and book format changes,... to push forward the time you won't be able to transfer the book.
In that way, DRM makes the lifetime of your e-books much shorter than that of your paper books (just ask people who bought DRM'ed books ten years ago). And that is why I don't want to pay the same price for the two types of books. I value a book's longevity.
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