Here are a couple reasons why teen me (I'm almost 30 now) may not have preferred eBooks over actual books:
1) I had only moved once in my life, and did not appreciate how much physical space books take up during a move. After moving ~4-5 times since going to college and graduate school, I have vowed to buy only eBooks now. Conveniently, I am also finally basically done buying academic textbooks (for which eBook versions can be scarce), having bought most of the ones I plan to use (often enough to not borrow a library copy) during my PhD and beyond.
2) In my experience, eBooks don't make it easy to annotate. Copies of my books from A Great Gatsby to Introduction to Biology are rife with pencilled in thoughts, arrows, underlines, etc. I've even enjoyed reading notes left by previous students in copies of books I've borrowed from the library (I am thinking of some comments I vehemently disagreed with in the Harvard library copy of Sartre's Search for Method, and to which I responded in turn). In that sense, library books might be more social than today's eBooks, as they can be both shared and annotated.
In regards to 2), something that I really enjoy when reading books on my Kindle is seeing the "popular highlighted passages". It basically shows you in your text where the most popular highlights are (so usually thousands of people have highlighted that passage for it to show up to you). I would love if they would expand that out further and allow popular comments/annotations as well (opt-in, of course)...although I'm sure there are a whole breadth of filtering and spam issues to deal with.
My ereader of choice is the Asus EeeNote. Very hard to find, and I'm not sure it's even made anymore. I ordered one from Taiwan (thanks, Chrome's built-in translation!). It has a Wacom digitizer, so it needs a pen, but that also means it doesn't register finger presses (so you can rest your hand on the screen while you write). There are a couple buttons at the bottom so you can flip through pages or through the menu without needing the pen in your hand. It's not the best ereader out there, but it's the only one I know of built for handwriting and reading at the same time. Black and white screen with no backlight, which is reportedly the reason Asus never sold it in the US. They didn't think the market would be there.
It can also be used just for note-taking (wifi sync with Evernote), it has Firefox built-in for web browsing, has a camera and can take audio notes as well. Plays MP3s. I use it a lot for writing notes in class while recording the audio of the professor. When I get home, my notes are already on my PC. Sitting at home, I can plug it into my PC and use it like a 8" Wacom digitizer in Photoshop. Totally worth the $250 shipped from Taiwan.
If those are the top 2 reasons, I suggest these as 3 and 4:
3) You lose the 'cover' of the book to signal to people what you're reading. Hanging out at Starbucks all day reading whatever it is you're reading is a good way to encourage conversations with other people who like the book/genre/author/style. This might not sound like too big a deal until you realize that teens use this to find sexual partners. (No, I'm not guessing here.)
4) They haven't yet had to lug their $365, hard cover, 800 page, 20 pound edition of "Calculus" from the dorm side of the campus to the science quad a mile and a half away.
A paper cover? (Or are you talking about something I'm not aware of?) Sure, but if I buy the "To Kill a Mockingird" cover and start reading another book, it doesn't change the cover.
The point I was trying to imply without saying it outright is that guys will take different books to places they'll be best received. There's an entirely different vibe in DC's "Adams Morgan" district than there is in the Shaw neighborhood, and the savvy pickup artist isn't likely to be reading the same book in both places.
1) I had only moved once in my life, and did not appreciate how much physical space books take up during a move. After moving ~4-5 times since going to college and graduate school, I have vowed to buy only eBooks now. Conveniently, I am also finally basically done buying academic textbooks (for which eBook versions can be scarce), having bought most of the ones I plan to use (often enough to not borrow a library copy) during my PhD and beyond.
2) In my experience, eBooks don't make it easy to annotate. Copies of my books from A Great Gatsby to Introduction to Biology are rife with pencilled in thoughts, arrows, underlines, etc. I've even enjoyed reading notes left by previous students in copies of books I've borrowed from the library (I am thinking of some comments I vehemently disagreed with in the Harvard library copy of Sartre's Search for Method, and to which I responded in turn). In that sense, library books might be more social than today's eBooks, as they can be both shared and annotated.