The New York Times has an interesting article up on the growing discussion/battle between physical books and e-books on devices like the Amazon Kindle and the Apple iPad.  The quotes below show one case of this tension, and the growing numbers of e-book device readers in some form.

Auriane and Sebastien de Halleux are at sharp odds over “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” but not about the plot. The problem is that she prefers the book version, while he reads it on his iPad. And in this literary dispute, the couple says, it’s ne’er the twain shall meet.

“She talks about the smell of the paper and the feeling of holding it in your hands,” said Mr. de Halleux, 32, who says he thinks the substance is the same regardless of medium. He added, sounding mildly piqued, “She uses the word ‘real.’ ”

By the end of this year, 10.3 million people are expected to own e-readers in the United States, buying about 100 million e-books, the market research company Forrester predicts. This is up from 3.7 million e-readers and 30 million e-books sold last year.

via Print or Pixels? Publishers Strive to Advance Both – NYTimes.com.

Personally for me it has taken me a long time to come around to reading books on my iPad or more generally reading books on an electronic device.  Since I have gotten the iPad earlier this year I have read parts of books on the device.  I have not read a whole book on it quite yet, but that is because of me losing focus on a book and starting and stopping.  I am not sure if I really will for the foresable future ever give up on physical books, but I certainly think I likely will split where I buy my books between digital and physical books from now on.   In the end I think digital will keep growing but I think for a long time at the very least that there will be a place still for physical books.  From the article and what I have written it is easy to see that in this one area it makes for an interesting discussion on the advancement of technology into this realm of book publishing and reading.