Yesterday I heard that eBook sales have increased by 150% over this year. While I have purchased quite a few eBooks, I still have a significant investment and ownership in hard copy books; books you can share, loan, and resell.
As the Kindle is the largest seller, I would also advise to be careful not to be sucked into Amazon’s web of control. DRM is unconstitutional, and unless you have the knowledge and capability (and desire) to break the law to support your constitutional rights, then it’s not a great idea to buy into the DRM cartel.
On top of that Amazon has continued to show that they care very little about their customers, as they continue to give precedence to the publishers as could be seen by their attempt to steal (and in many cases a successful one) of Orwell books, by crippling features of the device due to publisher pressure, by allowing publishers to charge only a few dollars less for a few bits that are crippled through DRM as compared to a hard copy, by creating new versions of their kindle every six months to ensure that old versions do not keep their value, and users continue to buy new ones.
Add on top of that, the fact that you loose your right of first sale (a right protected by U.S. copyright but trumped by the DMCA) in the fact that you cannot resell your kindle books.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I have 2 kindles, and spend a significant amount of money on books every year at Amazon (I am an avid reader), and many of those books are kindle books. But unless the book I want is one that I can use the "read to me" function while traveling, I usually opt for the paper books – or, sometimes, both (used hard copy and kindle copy).