Until they develop a really good note-taking / annotation system, I think academics are going to remain buyers of printed books for a long time. I think a well

Until they develop a really good note-taking / annotation system, I think academics are going to remain buyers of printed books for a long time. I think a well-done annotation system could be a big value-add for e-books, if those annotations were searchable, or operated like tags, etc. But until that day, the ability to scribble notes in the margins, underline key points in the text, and make comments on the back pages is going to be indispensable.