[blts]

Depends on the kind of a book. Novels, easy read - definitely better in e-form. Anything complex - textbook, or science popularization or even rich fiction - makes me miss real print. Mainly due to the lack of easy navigation. It is a lot easier to go back and re-read fragments in the real book than it is in the e-book.

TL;DR; Working with the book is easy in printed form and pain in e-format.

[zrobotics]

Huh, interesting that our preferences are polar opposites despite being formed for the same reasons. I much prefer technical or 'hard' literature in electronic format due to ease of searching and bookmarking, since I will often need to refer back to previous sections or take notes. However, for something like fiction novels I far prefer paper books, since I don't often need to reference back for something like a SF novel, so I don't care that it's harder to find a specific section.

Might be a difference in reading style, but for something like a physical textbook it is normal for me to have 40-50 separate bookmarks, which I always found unmanageable.

[armagon]

I agree 100%.

Which is a shame, because the primary reason I like ebooks is because technical books are so much cheaper in electronic format. Likewise, I'd much prefer to read a paper electronically than kill trees, but (even if you reflow a pdf [grr!]) it is so hard to follow the text when it references a diagram or a code sample on another page, as I want to see two different things at once, and it is so easy to have two pages open in a book (or, more likely, one two-page spread open flat) and switch between them quickly.

One more thing I'm torn on: I really like reading on a dedicated reader; it has much less eyestrain, and doesn't come in with built-in distractions (like the internet being a click away, or notifications popping up). OTOH, the responsiveness, being able to zoom in and out, for example, on a tablet, is really nice.