Most of the arguments for brick and mortar books over ebooks are based on purely irrelevant factors which are in no way necessary to the transmission of information. We wax poetic over the feel of a book in the hands and the smell of the pages only because those are sensations we associate with the act of reading. Even the act of reading is irrelevant. It is not essential to the process of receiving a story or factual information. I have, in the past belittled the act of reading, claiming that the sounds of the fire crackling and the bard tuning his harp are superior to the sensations associated with those of looking at a bunch of squiggly lines on some ephemeral piece of papyrus. The argument for permanence is also ephemeral as it depends on the limitations of present day technology. To say that there are written records 5000 years old is no argument since not one person in a million could read them. Information from just a few hundred years ago is understandable only with some knowledge of the language changes that have occurred over those years. If we had a technology that could encode the information in a form that was directly transmittable to the human brain and could store it in a form that was immune from degradation it would be far superior to anything we have today. We could even add ancillary sensations so that people could feel what their ancestors had to put up with to get information.
