I can't believe I actually just finished the OP article. Some of the sentences are inadvertently amusing, but the whole dragged.
Please, please, University of Chicago Press, do not waste the one free book you give us each month on Mr. Piper's tome.
Given my minimal sense of smell, my ideas there my be suspect. But I'm thinking that a modern paper book is far more similar in smell to an eReader than it is to a medieval codex made, as they almost always were, of animal skins. Even if a codex doesn't have much smell today, it probably smelled pretty strongly when first produced!
An even stronger article could have been written to attack the replacement of beautiful handmade vellum codexes by soulless machine-made paper books.
This doesn't mean I'm an eBook cheerleader. But if I was looking for the harm that might come out of the transition to eBooks, I wouldn't look to touch issues. Rather, I think it is the greater ease and safety in stealing eBooks over shoplifting paper ones.
P.S. Here is the University of Chicago freebee page I referred to above:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/freeEbook.html