As a book collector, I prefer print books, but I think we will have a long term need for both until e-book readers are as good as print at the things print still wins on (speed, clarity, layout, sense of permanence).
I buy e-books but only for things that are disposable, fiction, immediate, that have flat 'boring' designs, or that I otherwise don't need to scan through. E-book layouts are usually hideous (PDFs of print copies are an exception) and readers like the Kindle are useless for reference or anything I need to flick through. My Kindle can pull off a whole page every two seconds. I can flick through about 20 pages a second looking for something in print.
I'm guessing you have an old model of Kindle? My Nook takes less time on average to switch pages than I do to turn a physical page and scan to the beginning of the text.
Nope, the latest one. Against print, it's a wash for going sequentially from one page to the next.. but I also need to flick through many pages a second to scan or just get a feel for a book, and 1 page per second or two doesn't provide that.
I also frequently have multiple books open and jump between them scanning a lot as I do a lot of research. Again, not ideal for things like the Kindle, alas. But that's why I think we need both e-books and print.
I buy e-books but only for things that are disposable, fiction, immediate, that have flat 'boring' designs, or that I otherwise don't need to scan through. E-book layouts are usually hideous (PDFs of print copies are an exception) and readers like the Kindle are useless for reference or anything I need to flick through. My Kindle can pull off a whole page every two seconds. I can flick through about 20 pages a second looking for something in print.