A sound argument is that ebooks provide less spatial landmarks, this kind of context seems to be important for increased retention. See: http://healthland.time.com/2012/03/14/do-e-books-impair-memo...

In this usability research (http://www.nngroup.com/articles/ipad-and-kindle-reading-spee...) they found that ebook reading was slower than print for both the kindle and Ipad, however they weren't able to differentiate those two.

An often overlooked physical aspect of books is that they "live" directly in the environment, unmediated by screens, icons or distractions. Their physical presence prompts me to read them.

Embarrassingly, I've bought e-books and later realized I forgot about them. They tend to disappear into the "virtual shelf" or some corner of a hard drive somewhere.

The spatial landmarks you mention make a big difference for me. Somehow being able to hold the whole book in my hands helps me build up a mental index of what the book contains. I don't experience the same thing with ebooks.

4-6 Kindles and everything electronic is still a lot easier for me than storing books.

You've just blamed DRM and, in the preceding paragraph, fallen victim to the same fallacy that makes DRM look like a good idea: a computer is under the control of the user, any piece of software or content that seeks to control the computer will likely be broken and rejected.

Also, what do the operating systems have to do with anything at all? Have you ever even used an ebook?

I buy DRM-free books from O'Reilly all the time. But I would never buy a reference book in epub format because I like the ability to flip back and forth between many different sections of the book very quickly (if I have several sections marked I can literally flip to the section I want while picking up the book). Regardless of how good the ebook software becomes, I doubt it can achieve the simplicity of a paper book in this regard. I often use textbooks as reference books, so I feel similarly about textbooks.

Maybe you, or others, don't use certain books in the same way I do. Maybe you do, but don't have the hang-ups that I have. Fine. But that doesn't mean that the solution to my (or others who feel as I do) problem is just better software. That's unbelievably arrogant.

I started my PhD last year and was shocked at how intentionally broken academic e-books are. A few examples of daily experiences that send me into fits of frustrated rage and incredulity.

- ebook substitute for a text that only allows online perusal and restrict download for offline use. - ebooks that only allow access to one user per institution at a time (in an institution with 30k+ students) - ebooks that can only be viewed by adobe digital editions. - journal article pdf downloads that only display bitmap images of text so that copying quotes is impossible.

I'd much rather use electronic resources as physical storage of 200 texts per years is just nuts, but sadly, publishers would rather extract rent from a broken system.