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Okay, it's about time I actually responded to the original question: why ebooks.
It's a bit complicated for me.
My earliest forays into ebooks were with text files from Project Gutenburg on my two Newton devices. Great devices for reading, albeit rather bulky and inconvenient to carry around. Then they died and there really wasn't anything that could provide a comparable or superior reading experience other than dead trees. And that's what I went back to for quite a while.
Then electronic paper devices like the first generation Kindle started being made. Neat idea but not compelling at the start. And then I got this itch to find something that could replace computer printouts. The electronic paper thought came back and I started looking at large format devices (Kindles and the like were too small). iRex came to the rescue with iLiad, one of the first large format, dedicated readers (and the only one I could get my hands on at the time, and never mind that iRex deserved its fate).
And then my parents sold their house where I was keeping all of my dead trees and I didn't have any other place to store them. Despite my preference for physical media (of any sort) I simply didn't have space for all of it. I donated almost all of my books to the town library. Since then I've been almost exclusively ebooks. The rare exceptions are technical books for work and when I want an author to autograph something.
Personally, I think the last nail in the coffin of paper books as entertainment will be someone figuring out a way for authors to autograph ebooks at conventions and signing events and such.
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