It's a little bit presumptuous to speak for all book lovers on this, but I understand where he's coming from. Yet, I've personally found that it's fairly easy to convert readers to ebook forms.
I've been reading almost exclusively on a PDA for about 5 years now. I started with a Philips Nino that I got off Ebay for $20, and just upgraded to a Dell Axim that I also got for $20 at a yard sale. I've never been suckered into hundreds of dollars for a Kindle or any other device, when a small investment lets me handle open formats like txt and html. Just for example, I've only ever read Cory Doctorow's work on a PDA. With a good prog like uBook, the text is resizable to be comfortable, and the aspect ratio is the same as a novel.
Similar small investments and a DVD of the Blackmask library have gotten several of my friends off on the same course of ebook reading. Don't fall for the marketing, go cheap, go open, and save your money for the books you'll really keep.

A few years ago I was doing research on witchcraft at the QEII Library at Memorial University of Newfoundland. The librarian told me that I was unlikely to find much, as anything on the topic they put out on the shelves was stolen almost immediately. True enough; almost everything from Malleus Maleficarum down to modern glossy books on the topic had disappeared.

My wife made a similar object a few years ago to complement her Xmas village...she took a bunch of detritus from the kids' toybox....wayward Legos, discarded Polly Pocket carcasses, miscellaneous effluvia without apparent function or name, and glued the whole thing to a styrofoam cone, then painted it gold, making a most unusual Xmas tree. It actually looked rather nice against the colored lights.

This immediately made me think of Mann's "Mephisto". Everything old is new again.