It's going to take a while before all my books are available in e-format. I have a lot of old books for research, and though GoogleBooks has said they are working on making a number of orphan books available (as well as those OOP but not orphaned, per se), but it hasn't happened yet. Even when they are available, I can't always rely on them - several of the pd GoogleBooks that I've downloaded have blurry pages.
That said, I think it will happen, just not right away. A universal format (where I don't have to worry about the specific reader I use), high quality OCR (even for old fonts), and a hi-res color screen in e-ink will all be necessary before I give up my pbooks.
As has been mentioned, ebooks for research can be superior to pbooks - searching is one big point (but, again, reliable OCR is imperative here). I think the horse analogy is a good one - we no longer rely on them for day-to-day living, but they are still around and beautiful as ever.
As we go forward, it's wonderful that new books are (almost) all already rendered digitally, even when they will be printed physically. For new books, I'd say, we need the good readers they keep dangling before us but don't give us. When the current mantra of "next year, next year" becomes "now!" - then we'll see that wholesale movement to ebooks, imo. (Though the Luddites will just have to die off, of course.)
Until all that happens, most of my books are staying right where they are.
