I don't know whether the world is going to work better or worse if e-books one day totally replace the traditional kind of book. All I would say is that if you believe it'll be worse you need a better argument than Jonathan Franzen's. I say this, incidentally, as someone determined to stick with the old kind of book and who actively doesn't want a Kindle or other kind of e-reader. But here's Franzen's reasoning:
"I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn't change."
.....
He said: "The Great Gatsby was last updated in 1924. You don't need it to be refreshed, do you?"Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I'm handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing - that's reassuring.
"Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it's just not permanent enough."
This is lazy thinking. First, electronic editions of Gatsby can reproduce the same final text as is printed on paper. Second, old-fashioned books can have new editions in which the author has made changes to the original text. Third, people can write stuff destined not to appear on paper but only electronically - like blogposts - and still work to make it say what they want and not take a casual attitude to its being amended (by others) or deleted. And so forth.