Come on - an EBook like Kindle doesn't require net access - you can have thousands of books in your hand. And the current model runs for a week or two between recharges. Those are hardly issues now, and will become non-issues in the next year or two.
Lets admit it - books have no advantage whatsoever beyond our lifetime familiarity and affection for them. They will go away as surely as victrolas, snuff boxes, spats and buggy whips.
I've been hearing about "the paperless society" for probably 30 years. Have to I'm starting to become skeptical. I see the death of books as very much akin. Sure, it seems to make sense on paper, but ...
It will be interesting to see how this plays out over time. Used to be a generation of kids you were all free-love and pro-dope who then seemed to have gone 180 on all that. Maybe not the best comparison, but the interests and needs of people change as they get older. OTOH I really don't see people raised without a land-line ever deciding they're missing very much, so it goes both ways.
(I'm beginning to think we need to watch middle-aged women to get a real sense of the future.)
I still buy a lot of physical books, but not very often in a physical store. I only buy a few CDs, but those too I get online. That's just where I can find them. CD's, though, are not interesting as objects and do nothing to enhance the interaction with the content. A book, however, offers a set physical, spatial, 3D cues about the content (e.g., that interesting quote was at about the middle of the book, or five pages back).
In a way, vinyl beats digital in that regard; it's been a while, but I recall the way one would interact (so to speak) with a record. Side A; side B; getting up to flip the record. It offered a different kind of connection than a CD or MP3.
I'd like to see the printed page use e-ink or something so that I can get the best of both worlds in a morphing bundle of bound flippable pages holding everything I want to read.
