What's underappreciated by many is how much the book is a highly-crafted and optimised product.
There's very little about a book that's innate, rather, conventions from size to font to structure and organisation, contents, indices, notes, pagination for eff's sake, all had to be arrived at and designed.
That's happened over centuries, and represents a great deal of embedded wisdom.
I become painfully aware of this when reading online, whether on desktop (can be OK with a suitably large screen), laptop (horrible), OLED tablet (OK, but not great), or e-ink device (far better, though still has limitations).
A book's robustness, persistence, and flexibility of access are hard to match. Digital gives options for search, access, and automation, which can be handy.
What most plagues online book formats, I'm concluding after using an e-ink device for nearly two years, is displays. Emissive, low-resolution, wrong format, and difficulty in reading under bright illumination. E-ink addresses most of these (at sufficient size: 8" minimum, 10" or 13" is preferable for detailed works).
That still leaves a lot to the specific technical format and typography of individual e-books, and there are designs which work better than others.
There's also the mechanics of ebook reader software, most especially of navigation and annotation. The directness of physical objects (leafing or flipping through pages, scribbling a quick note in pencil or pen, dog-earing, physical bookmarks) is lost, though good designs can come reasonably close.
(I'm trying to find a book on, erm, The Book, which I'd found and believe is somewhere in my (electronic) collection, though it's been eluding me for the past quarter hour or so.)
Edit: Found it. Keith Houston, The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time (2016)
You explained it very well, and “The Book” looks interesting.
But… Apart from being nice to look at, a (very big) bookshelf is such a waste of space I wish there where something in between a real book and an ebook.
The storage density differential between paper/print and digital storage is ... staggering.
One of my favourite illustrations is that of the Central Social Institution of Prague. From photos of it, you'll understand where Futurama got its flying desks from:
I've guestimated the total possible data storage capacity at about 500 GB, with a likely achieved storage of far less, probably more on the order of 25 GB. You could tuck the whole archive into a microSD card on your mobile phone or tablet.
The problem with digital archives is discoverability and browseability. Shelf-scanning books in a good library really is a pleasure, though there are alternatives in the digital world, mostly involving traversing bibliographies, references, and citations. Not the same, but similar.
There's also the Star Trek convention of electronic documents being bound to a specific tablet or reader, rather than being data beamed or transmitted between devices. Yet another case of visual storytelling trumping technical rigour, though it has a certain charm.
The brutalism of a large array of bound books is appealing, but particularly hard to accomplish with digital systems, though some sort of digital signage showing a sampling or overview of a collection might offer some visibility.
I've recently made the acquaintance of Bill Janssen, retired from Xerox PARC, who worked on their digital library management tools in the 1990s and aughts:
On my tablet / e-reader, I've collected a number of images of libraries, including one that seems to have roughly as many books visible as I have on my device (roughly 10,000). Just as a sort of visual contextualisation.
It shows the home library of Johns Hopkins professor Dr. Richard Macksey in Baltimore. The full collection size of 51,000 volumes would be somewhat more, I estimate about 10,000 are visible in the image as composed.
To a rough approximation, that image shows the number of documents that fit on my e-book reader.
