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Rather than have one more device to carry and worry about charging up, I'd prefer more focus on book reading software for my Vista laptop and/or my smart phone.
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"Oh, let's go read a book in bed!" With a laptop...
And if he thinks that a smartphone is a good alternative for an ebook reader, he has never seen one. I mean, how big is the average smartphone screen and how big is the average ebook reader screen?
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But there is also a more pragmatic reason for holding off on buying an ebook reader: the cost. The Kindle is $359 and the Sony models range from $299 to $399. To most of the folks with whom I've discussed it, that seems like a lot to pay for such a device. Many people have told me that "if it were $100, I'd buy one in a minute." Three to four hundred bucks for a reader might have seemed reasonable back when full fledged computers were all close to $1000 and laptops were even more, but now that you can buy a netbook for about the same price as a dedicated reader - and get up to a gig of memory and 20 to 80 GB of storage space - the choice seems like a no-brainer to many.
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One thing about cost is that it will go down. Which he just completely ignores. Back then, laptops etc, were way more expensive than they are now, and they dropped in price because people started buying them, which will always drop the price. Ebook readers are fairly new (at least the e-ink varieties) and they are only recently coming to the attention of the average public. Which will mean, as soon as more companies will start making those things, more people will start buying and the prices will go down.
Yes, they are expensive right now, and the book selection isn't as large as the pbook selection right now. But the more people get into this, the more the selection will become and the cheaper (and the more variety) the readers.