While ebooks are nice, they may not be everything the PR guys have lead us to believe. There are some serious questions and ongoing research about how much we retain when reading via ebook versus a traditional hard-copy book. Some of the articles on this subject can be found at:
That being said, I have a Kindle and before that a Nook. I like both of them, and do a bit of reading on it. However, I can attest to the issue of memory retention. When I went back to school, I rented a chemistry ebook. It was cheaper, and as many have said, it has the search function. However, it was the worst thing for completing my school work. I found it hard to remember information, having to read the same material over and over to get it to 'stick'. And while the search function sounds good, it is useless when you get back 2000+ hits. It was the last time I used an ebook as a text book.
Which begs the question, if we are using ebooks for reference materials and learning new skills (such as Scott's book), are we going to have more frustration if we don't retain the material as readily? This is nothing against Scott, as the publishers are pushing the ebooks as hard as anyone for financial reasons. But I'm not so sure that hard-copy books are on death's doorstep. The sale of tablets/e-readers has dropped dramatically (just ask Apple about their sales of iPads). Even Amazon offers publishers the ability to create hard-copy books as well as ebooks from the same source material (through CreateSpace -
https://www.createspace.com/).
Again, I would discount the hard-copy book yet. There is a reason why a significant number of folks want the option to print-out material, etc.