Book is a book is a book is a book...

...But you lose a certain sense of real when you read it on a screen.
A book is a round-trip ticket to an unkown destination. Whether or not you've read a summary, reviews, or seen the movie, you still won't know the whole story until you've read it.
They're like vacations that sell at AAA. Sure, the brochures might have a high-gloss finish of a white sand beach and skies so blue they must be photoshopped (they are), but you won't truly know what you're in for until you go there. They're kind of like that.
When you go on any kind of trip, it'll be memorable. Good or bad. Successful or disastrous. That trip will be sandwiched in that period of time in your life. If you write in the margins, you'll know what you were thinking. Coffee stain? That day you bought overpriced coffee and the new guy overfilled the cup. Remember? Books can be blank, but the ones that are read typically aren't. Unless you're obsessed with book cleanliness or something.
The same can't be said for reading on a Kindle, iPad, uh...Nook or whatever. It's a technologically dominated world. I share Tom Piazza's view of"I mean, you can give somebody a book; it has weight, it’s a gesture of faith in the future." The same can't be said for an eBook. It's like downloading every piece of music online and not looking at a CD. Or better, a record. Yes, I am one of those people.
It's reading things electronically that eradicates the personal value of books. Your iPad's "pages" will never fray. They will never be dog-eared. Or stained. Wrinkled. Torn. Memorable.
But you know what, Joe Meno, vous avez des idées avec lesquelles je suis d'accord. "The fact that books provide us the place to imagine is critically important, as it is there, in the imagination, that all sense of possibility rests." Sorry for the quote bomb. But yeah, I agree that the imagination that comes with reading a book of any kind is attributed to the person, not to the physical form of the book.
But I still want my hard cover and ripped pages and notes in the margins.
Once you read a book, really read it, not like skim-it-and-read-summaries-like-you-probably-did-for-Shakespeare, it sticks with you. You can't un-read it. Whether it meant a lot to you or not, you'll remember it. But mostly if it meant a lot to you.
Books take you places and when you leave it, you leave those places, and you can go back but when you read it the second time it won't be the same as the first time. When you read it the third time it won't be the same as the second. If you never read it again, then you'll never go back to that place. But you were there once, and that's what matters. Even if you read it on your $80 surrogate book.