One of my TODOs in my ever-growing list of tasks has been to read more books. They can be consumed a few ways (including as food, if you're desparate enough) and each way certainly has its list of pros and cons.
The most obvious way to read a book is to purchase or borrow a physical copy of the book and read it from cover-to-cover. It's straightforward, usually cheaper if you know a good second-hand bookstore (or get lucky at thrift stores), and is how, up until the mid 2000's and the advent of super cheap consumer technology, most readers got their fix.
However, the rumblings of a new way of reading started as soon as the 70s, with mostly silence until 2007 when the original Kindle was released. The E-Reader was taking the world by a storm. Gone were the days of hoping your library had the book you've been dying to read, or having to shell out for and subsequently either store or try to re-sell a physical copy- now, with a credit card and an internet connection, you could purchase almost any book you wanted to read and carry your entire collection around on one device.
E-Readers solved the largest friction point in reading-as-a-hobby (RaaH, coming soon to a startup near you) and made it even more accessible to the masses. Even better, many libraries partner with OverDrive to allow you to borrow e-books from your local library. Undeniably, these are more convenient for anybody who wants to read more than a few books per month or have a limited amount of physical space to store books.
Even with the extreme convenience electronic book readers provide, physical books are very nice to keep around. For one, they don't have a battery and generally can last quite a while as long as they aren't outright abused. The other nicety is the tactility of a book. You physically see and feel how close you are to the end of it, rather than just a number on a screen. You have to make a real movement to go to the next page, not just tap the screen or press a button. You can huff the glue.
Another situation where E-Readers fall short is in image-heavy or strongly-laid-out content, such as comics, manga, or textbooks. Several books I own, the author has released the e-book for free but the physical copy is $50+ because the entire book has full color images throughout as demonstrations of what it's describing. The steep cost of the physical copy is, in my eyes, well worth it because any e-reader capable of displaying color either misses the mark due to using a traditional LCD display, or uses a slow color e-ink display with a limited color gamut.
With those caveats out of the way, I still prefer e-readers for the majority of my reading. Convenient, light, super-portable, and I don't have to worry about storing my books or finding new homes for them when I'm done reading.
Maybe someday we'll have a replicator that can just magic up the proper physical form of whatever book we feel like reading, and recycle it when we're done reading it.