While I think it is certainly a good idea to have all printed matter stored electronically, the hardcopies are every bit as important. First of all, nobody is going to sit there and read "Leviathan" on a monitor screen. I prefer to sit back or lay down when I read. I always read before going to sleep--anything, doesn't much matter. I have a wide variety of books all around my bed for just such a purpose.

When I go out somewhere for lunch during work, I always have a book or at least a magazine with me. Also, I like to spring back and forth through pages with most of the stuff I read and that's just utterly tedious scrolling up and down. I also like to read, say, a book on the history of Gnosticism and have the Nag Hammadi library in paperback right there for reference and I switch back and forth freely which is, again, tedious to do with a computer.

Otoh, digitization is fantastically good for doing searches. I cannot describe my gratitude to have that feature available to me now. Searches that would have been far too tedious and time-consuming to bother with before have often caused good information to be lost because I couldn't chase down every reference. Digitization can make a global search of a text several hundred pages long in a matter of seconds. In fact, you can perform searches no one has ever performed before on any text or document. That's quite amazing. Plus you can carry literally thousands of pages with you on a memory stick and print portions of it somewhere if need be.

But I was talking more about regular books and a normal sized community library with a few thousand books.