There are many more advantages to real, physical books: - if I lose one, I'm out $5-$20, not $100 (or more) - can't break it (half the people I know with kindles have broken them). No worries about bringing it to the beach, throwing it casually into a bag, or whatever - in rare cases (mainly travel guides) I can rip pages out of them if I can't carry the whole book - many are small enough to carry in a jacket pocket The list goes on and on. The real physical "feel" of the book and the cost (I buy most books used on Amazon, often for just few dollars, and sometimes the kindle price is as much as 5 times the used price) are the most important reasons, but everything above, as well as everything else mentioned makes physical books SO much better. The *only* advantage that I see to electronic books is that they take up less space. There's a lot of stuff I could do in my small apartment with an extra 20 square feet of shelf space. But 1 - note that this is not really an issue when traveling because you'll have at most 2 books with you, and 2 - it doesn't come close to making up for all the benefits of real books.