I love holding books - and I think covers and binding are important too. I can remember a lecturer telling us offhandedly one day that a previous student had found our text book too unwieldy (it was The Riverside Chaucer...), and so had torn it in half! I was mortified!

As for computers and learning to read - I'm not sure - in some ways, it should be fine, since you're just teaching to recognise a symbol and its relation to a sound and/or concept. However, later in school... and I'm just now writing an essay on whether it is imperative for me as an English teacher to use ICT in the class... there are apparently some studies that show 'reading' differs between page and screen. Whether this is bad or not, I'm not sure - I'm sure there were changes in how people read with the change from scroll to codex, too...