> You know the text is just as real if you read it from the screen?

It's not about the text being "real", it's about the UI of printed pages versus screens. You can use the space around you, and leverage spatial reasoning, better with paper. You'd need multiple really big, digital-pen-input-ready, high-res screens, plus some very nice specialized software, to come close to the same experience with computers—and still only kinda, for some situations but not others. Or you can just print a few sheets of paper at pennies per sheet and have a couple pens and highlighters around.

Physical paper is just another UI, and remains better for some things than screens are. Screens do have some advantages—you can't full-text-search the sheets of paper you have splayed over your desk or pinned up on the whiteboard or tackboard, of course, though given how good & fast OCR is getting, we might be able to do exactly that when AR eventually takes off. You can't have animations on a piece of paper. You can't back your paper up in the cloud. But you can also have ten pages visible all at once, with paper, and recall "I think that one part was somewhere to the top-left...". You can fold it. You can doodle on it. You can stuff it between relevant pages in a book. You can bundle related pages together with consistent ordering in a UI I that's quite nice for many purposes (AKA a binder). Put all those together and there are plenty of times printed pages beat screens (though, to emphasize again just to make this entirely clear, not always).

> Paper is also annoying to deal with. I've had an e-reader for 10 years but the odd older book isn't available. You'd think based on comments online that a real book is some magical wonderful thing, but they're an ass to use, heavy, large to store. Their only virtue is that they look nice on a shelf. But the other thing that looks nice is something other than a shelf.

From my perspective e-readers have exactly two killer features: space/weight savings (this one is, to be fair, a huge advantage, and is the only reason I have one), and not needing separate "large print" editions for readers with poor eyesight. The UI of paper books is, in practically every other way, better. Two pages visible at a time is great. Being able to easily hold open a couple different parts of the book at once is great. Full-text search is occasionally nice but a good index is, overall, better (to be fair, being an ebook doesn't rule out having a good index, but I find them far more awkward to use than in physical books). Commentary and notes and annotations and anything that leverages the fixed, physical space of the page, including things like thoughtful typesetting (especially noticeable with poetry) are all better in a real book. Endless customization is obviously nice in a lot of ways, but the flexibility of ebooks harm some use cases—it's no coincidence that a lot of non-fiction struggles with representation in e-book form, without resorting to fixed-size PDF.

IMO ebooks aren't a book replacement, they're a totally new format, and creating content that best suits them won't be identical to creating content that best suits books, and books that are simply format-shifted to ebooks are bound (ha, ha) to suffer in some ways for it. The most apt comparison I can think of is the transition from scrolls to bound volumes. It's not hard to think of ways that scrolls would have been superior to codices, and while ultimately the latter may have been overall-better and certainly did win out, they weren't universally and in all ways better. Ultimately, the space-savings thing may win the day for ebooks (again, it is a huge advantage) and print books may largely vanish, but it won't be because ebooks are strictly superior formats for reading.