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Living in Taiwan presents many of the same problems regarding books as in Singapore, so I can definitely relate to the high prices and humidity issues. You can even find dry cabinets to avoid too much book damage from the humidity.
To me, ebook devices are just too crippled and primitive. Nothing about them is high quality, and even the centerpiece of their design, the e-ink screens, are mediocre and can't compare to any decent printing (that includes cheap digitally printed mass market paperbacks) due to the ridiculously low contrast and poor resolution. If you ever flip through pages in a paper book to skim, scan, or hunt down information, ebook readers are a complete joke currently. If you're like me, you will have to move farther away from the reader so the low quality screen doesn't annoy you, and you will have to change your reading method so that you just plod through books in a linear fashion.
Hopefully the rules regarding sharing and resale of books will become less draconian, or perhaps the prices will reflect the tragic crippling of the medium. I find it amusing how the marketing always goes "imagine, only $9.99 for an ebook instead of $25 for the paper edition", trying to compare it to a hardcover.
With paper books...if I finish reading it, I start lending it to friends or students or perhaps give it away as a gift or resell it second-hand at a really low price to give someone a bit of a bargain. With an ebook...I can read it and...then leave it alone or delete it. Just seems a bit selfish.
Not too bad for the classics that you can get for free though and that allow distribution. For more contemporary books though that I can't recycle in some way digitally, I'm more inclined to sacrifice the ebook reader convenience and portability for paper book quality and versatility.
But who knows...in the future, at least navigation should get a little better, even if the screens continue to suck and proprietary formats and DRM and dubious licensing continue to arbitrarily limit the usability of books.
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