The better our iPads and iPhones get, the more we do with them—such as reading books and magazines, not just websites and Twitter feeds. Which has prompted Rik Myslewski to wonder…

Last July, Amazon reported that sales of e-books passed those of hardcovers. This January, e-book sales passed paperbacks. In March, brick-and-mortar bookseller Borders filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Most recently, my beloved neighborhood bookstore, Cover to Cover, called it quits after decades of serving our community as a warm and friendly source of reading and research advice, as well as a comfy haven for kids, grown-ups, and old folks alike.

Put me in that third age group. I’ve recently passed into my golden “Hey you kids, get off my lawn!” years, and having done so, I’m now licensed to mutter about the passing of life’s pleasures. Such as bookstores. And books.

The pack of printed pages you now hold in your hands is going the way of carbon paper and floppies. At the recent GigaOM Big Data conference in New York City, a Barnes & Noble exec opined that overall sales of e-books will overtake hard-copy books within the next two years. In the battle between electrons and atoms, the negatively charged subatomic particles are coming on strong. Although less than a million e-readers were sold in 2009, it’s estimated that 18 million of the li’l book-assassins will find their way into human hands this year -- and that doesn’t even count multipurpose devices such as the iPad.

And why shouldn’t e-readers take off? Carrying multiple books on your iPad, Kindle, Nook, or whatever is hella convenient, as is purchasing one of the millions of offerings available from Apple, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and others. Personally, my iPad and iPhone are welcome companions during commuting and at lunch counters. Hell, I read all of War and Peace on my iPhone during my daily trips on the San Francisco subway. Seriously.

And e-readers will get better. Technologies such as low-power color e-paper coming from Fujitsu and Qualcomm will lessen battery requirements -- and weight. Roll-up displays being worked on by HP, LG Electronics, and others will allow for more-compact form factors. Book-in-a-tube, anyone? Someday we’ll regard today’s iPad as being as chunky and clunky as the original Mac Portable, which weighed seven times that of a MacBook Air.

But let’s not fool ourselves: we’re giving up a lot as we enter the Brave New World of e-books and e-readers. Like, well, books. There’s a lot to be said for those paginated piles of squished sawdust and cotton balls, such as a wonderfully intuitive user interface, essentially infinite “battery life,” and no worries about future operating-system incompatibilities.

Of course, my old-guy prejudice in favor of the aforementioned word-delivery devices is influenced by my 3,000-book home library. In a quiet moment, I can scan my shelves, lift out an old friend, and in a pseudo-Proustian reverie, be transported by the mere smell and texture of an old copy of, well, À la recherche du temps perdu. Books provide a multisensory, human immediacy that can’t be matched by any e-reader.

There’s also the pleasure of handing a book to a friend and sharing, discussing, and debating with book in hand and others nearby—just as my neighborhood did for decades with Mark and Traci at Cover to Cover. A good bookseller -- and they were good booksellers—knows you, your tastes, and your literary capabilities. Ask your community bookstore’s resident bibliophile for the best book to accompany you on, say, a 16-hour flight to Istanbul, and their suggestion will be far more accurate than one from any Amazon.com algorithm.

And it will be warm, friendly, kind, and personal—four traits that don’t lend themselves all that well to the rapidly accelerating Digital Wonderland.

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Since the late 1980s, Rik Myslewski has paid his rent by keeping an eye on Apple. He was editor-in-chief of MacAddict from 2001 until its transformation into Mac|Life in early 2007, and is now a member of the snarkily sophisticated team at London’s The Register, which is “biting the hand that feeds IT” daily at www.theregister.co.uk.