E-book or Paper?

Last summer I acquired a Kindle and took all my holiday reading on it - really helpful as I normally pack 4-5 books for a 2-week stay. It was also brilliant for down-time while I was a volunteer driver at the Olympics. So far, I've only used it for novels - I have an unwritten rule, seldom broken, that I will not reread novels because there's so much that's new out there. However, I still buy good old paper when it comes to non-fiction. I was therefore interested when two separate posts on the eboook vs paper debate crossed my screen.

They come from Nicholas Carr and Josh Catone. Both make some good points, though I think both are also driven by nostalgia and one wonders what attitudes will be like when this generation is no longer in the ascendancy. Much has been made of the economic differential - ebooks do tend to be priced below the physical artifact, and it's easy to see that publishing costs will be lower, but the ebook price-point is often not that far below paper (is the margin consequently much higher?).

I have some sympathy with the arguments about beauty and attachment. I purchased Umberto Eco's "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" a few years ago and I cannot imagine an ebook being a suitable substitue, for instance. Conversely the latest novel I have read is Patrick deWitt's "The Sisters Brothers" and I cannot believe that I lost anything by reading it on the Kindle; I will not read it again, I see no reason to have a copy cluttering up my book shelves (already groaning and in need of extension) and the only real downside is that I cannot give it to someone else.

Two other books that I've purchased in the last couple of years are second-hand: William Bodham Donne's (my great great great grandfather) "Essays on the Drama" and Catherine Bodham Johnson's (my great grandmother) "William Bodham Donne and His Friends". Both books have hand-written dedications by their respective authors on the fly-leaf. Somehow, possessing WBD's Kindle (had they been around in his day) would have nothing like the same allure.

Finally, I mentioned still buying physical non-fiction. The main driving force here is the ease of dipping in and out, referring back and forward, and using a book for research or study. Ebooks just don't do this for me. Now some may argue that it's just that I haven't learned how to do it efficiently with the electronic version but I just know that I find it so much easier to hold three or four positions in a paper book with my fingers so that I can rapidly cross refer. 'Nuff said.