This makes me wonder if ebooks have the same effect --- because these days, owning a few thousand of them or more, although perhaps maybe not completely legally, is nothing more than the price of an Internet connection.
I too wonder about this. Having read from physical books most of my life and switching to ebooks/PDFs (reading from laptop or iPad) was not as fun/convenient as I thought it would be. Although saving resources, the feeling I get when holding a book and writing in it (jogging down thoughts or deriving equations) are irreplaceable by electronic files.