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I'd still say stiff paper would be better than plastic, though. Plastic is more durable, sure, but not biodegradable. Anyone remember the litter of AOL CDs everywhere?
Maybe if they were made of one of the regularly recycled plastics, like HDPE.
With regards to the Harry Potter ebooks, I haven't seen an actual quote by Rowling that she nixed the idea. As far as I've been able to tell, it was her publishers who didn't want to do it.
Liviu_5, we'll have to agree to disagree, I guess. In my opinion, the transition to digital music was made with the CD, and that was the springboard the MP3 players depended on. But music has always depended on some kind of technological encoding requiring equipment to decode (unless you want to count sheet music), whereas books have existed for a long time as a standalone technology. This is relevant because it means people have always had to purchase some kind of device to play musical recordings (for as long as musical recordings have been available). The MP3 player was yet another in a series of devices people had already gotten used to. There is no precedent like this for ebooks, unless you want to count computers themselves, as used to read web pages and other online content.
My conclusions about the primary barriers to ebook readers being the lack of interest in purchasing a dedicated device are based on a very limited survey of people I know who are heavy readers (multiple books per month, sometimes per week), but are not interested in ebooks. I asked why. The reasons I gave above are the reasons they gave. They were completely unaware of whether the books they would want are available as ebooks or not-- they haven't even checked.
I do believe that availability of titles is a critical factor, I just don't believe it's the one currently holding ebooks back. I have not yet met a single person who has told me "I considered getting an ebook reader (or reading on a PDA, etc), but most of the books I want aren't available" or similar.
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