I too have the same concern about the book as a conversation starter. But on top of this, I’m concerned about the impossibility of sharing. Overall, books are a great tool to socialize: starting conversations, giving away a book that you loved and that you think may be of some interest to the recipient. Also — as Borja wrote above — as something something that carries cultural heritage. Something that survives us. Our culture, influenced by the Internet and TV before it, is becoming more and more instantaneous. Books are important tools, in my opinion, to balance this.

We need to evolve copyright and get rid of DRMs so that electronic books can be shared with others and last longer than our lifetime.

I enjoy reading on the Kindle but I do miss the ability to skim casually. While reading Richard Evan’s “The Coming of the Third Reich” I never had a sense of “where am I in this book?”. The book has zillions of pages of footnotes so the location indicator doesn’t provide that feedback. You definitely miss the “sweep” of the book because you can’t easily flip through the pages.

In some ways having a book in eBook form makes it easier to treat it like another blog post or news article, it’s easier to forget it’s there. A book sitting around with a bookmark in it is a good reminder – “hey buddy, remember me?”.

I look forward in the future to reading tech books on an iPad reader, I hate having to manage the large tomes that inevitably accumulate on my shelves. I use Oreilly’s Safari Online but for really reading it’s still clunky. Some titles are in image format because of the limitations of HTML which means the text quality is fuzzy. An iPad with Retina display, now we’re talking…

It might seem like a minor thing to some but I find the low-quality font on the Kindle tiresome, I wish Amazon had put in a little more time to coming up with better font options, ones that make better use of the higher resolution of the eInk display. That’s a missed opportunity I think.

I think ebooks will complement rather than substitute traditional books, the same way all the new music formats haven’t killed the radio.

As a lifelong bachelor, however, books are basically the only way I know how to decorate. It used to be easy to cover 12 feet of wall space with books and never have to give it a second thought.

Now I’m screwed.

There are aspects I miss about curling up with a good book in my lap rather than an eBook, but I’m working through them. The ability to have a library in my backpack is a marvel I’m also not willing to give up.

Having people scan your bookshelves when they come to visit (and doing the same) has always been a window for me, a conversation starter. “Oh, you’ve read such and such? What did you think of so and so?” Etc.

Now, what? You might glimpse what’s on the DVR if it comes up, or talk about something one of you tweeted? Something you shared as a Facebook link?

We still have a lot of books in our house, but I can’t think of the last time we bought any that weren’t Kindle editions. Rob and I still talk about our books (mostly by directly asking, rather than passively observing), but it’s still a whole different sort of thing.

Where are the cultural artifacts in a digital age?