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I own mainly specialty non-fiction which is often out-of-print (reference texts, hobby learning stuff, artbooks, history/culture books about particular places I am interested in, etc.) and graphics novels (deluxe editions fully loaded with bonuses preferred). And a whole bunch of old school used sf/fantasy paperbacks I picked up dirt-cheap, whose authors have generally not yet made it to e-version.
So, the used bookshop is still highly Relevant To My Interests®, even if I don't frequent them nearly as often as I used to.
That said, I mainly buy my fiction as e-books now, when I bother to buy it at all (I've been reading stuff from the library for years and really only purchasing in paper my very favourite "keeper" authors whom I'm usually willing to collect everything from, long before I even got an e-reader in the first place).
And I agree that there are mixed results when e-reading reference works. I have a whole bunch of Routledge's foreign language Essential & Comprehensive Grammar series in both paper & e-editions (thanks to the recent multi-account deep-discount Kobo coupon glitch from one of their contests, which made them affordable).
On the one hand, the paper editions are much easier to flip through and locate an explanation/example that I was reasonably sure happened in this section or other. On the other hand, the e-book edition could be readily searched for all mentions of the usage of words or phrases I accurately remembered the keywords* for (though Routledge is pretty good about including comprehensive indexes on their grammars).
So both forms have their advantages, and if I happen to score any more deep-discount coupons in future Kobo contests, I'm prioritizing their usage towards acquiring more of the Routledge Grammars for languages I don't necessarily care to have in a pricey paper reference, but am curious enough about to be willing to get a copy if it's low-priced enough to work out as an impulse buy.
* Well, except for those languages which use a standardized but otherwise non-Latin script and ended up representing both the original language examples and the English grammatical glosses and translations with non-searcheable gifs rather than including a custom font and using Unicode for the text, sigh.
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