Ah, but who says book readers will remain huge, glowing, headache-inducing computer screens? I can envision a type of book viewer which very much resembles a book. You can even make the pages look as if they're on a paper background.

  Me too! Like a flat rectangle about the size of a paperback that's almost all screen (the kind that doesn't hurt), with a few buttons on the bottom and a grip on the side. It would work great with PDFs. I can see people buying microchip-things containing books and sticking them into the reader, like a cartridge.
  Has anyone done a book study where they wrote notes in the margins as they read? I can see this book reader making that possible without permanently defacing the book, since it's easy to erase things like that from a computer. Just plug in your keyboard.
  Heck, you could probably play Mp3s and cartride games on the thing.
  The only problem I can see with a book reader is that different books would require different screen sizes, so you'd have to buy a few of them to get the right experience. You can't curl up with an enormous book the size of a newspaper, but you can't view artwork on a cute paperback.
  If I ever write sci-fi, I think I'll use this.

  But I'm a bibliophile, not an ebibliophile. I love books. I love the feel and smell of paper. I love the variety of fonts. I love the beautiful covers. I love owning old volumes. And there's something to be said for flipping through a physical book to find a specific sentence when you don't remember the page number. On a computer, it's slower, you can only view so many pages at once, and I personally find it easier to figure out the direction I have to move in to find something in a book if it's really in front of me in three dimensions.
  Worth saving trees? I guess people who grow up on ebooks will love it. Even I'll tolerate them if they're like that.