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Today Amazon’s eBook brainchild Kindle grows up, a day early. The buzz around its release is well warranted – this iteration is beautifully thin, sleek, and has a ton of new features including instant dictionary searching, text annotation, and read-aloud audio. Traditional booksellers like Barnes & Noble are nervously watching Amazon and the growing eBook market to see if it will have a significant impact on regular book sales.

Yet despite all the commotion, I’m not convinced that we’re truly ready for a  paperless revolution, at least not yet. eBooks and eBook readers have been pushing into the spotlight for quite some time now, but have largely failed for a variety of reasons: battery dies too quickly, text too pixelated, display fatigues eyes, text scrolls awkwardly, doesn’t look like a book, doesn’t feel like a book.

Amazon’s first Kindle was the first ebook reader to successfully address the readability problem of digital text by using e-Ink technology (they call it “electronic paper displays”). The new one is even better in that respect, employing 16 shades of gray in the display for a more natural reading experience.

One of the reasons why we have been slow to adapt eBooks into our daily lives is that it’s a large disconnect from what we do normally. It’s a fact in marketing: the more effort it takes to integrate a new product into daily lives, the longer it takes for it to become mainstream, if it does at all. On the flipside, greater ease of transition leads to faster and wider distribution. Flat screen TVs succeeded because you veg and watch TV the same way, regardless of whether you’re watching a rear-projection or a monstrous LCD.

From the moment we learn to read and write, we’re taught to do so on paper. We flip through pages, bookmark them, underline important sentences, scribble in the sidelines, stick Post-It notes everywhere. Kindle and eBooks in general, if they succeed, threaten to send all of these habits into obsolescence. Yes, Kindle 2 offers text annotation, but it lacks the immediacy and spontaneity of grabbing a pen and writing directly on the page. Yes, it turns pages instead of scrolls text, but you miss the charm of running hundreds of pages under your thumb.

I grew up as a total bookworm. I read novels until 3am when my mom would notice the light on in my room and would yell at me to go to bed, at which point I’d turn off the lights and switch on my flashlight to finish the story. Call me an old dog who can’t learn any new tricks, but after two decades of working with paper, I’m pretty set in my tree-killing ways. I read slower on screens, so I print out documents. I briefly outlined this post with pen and paper before writing up its digital version. I do that with everything I type up. I suspect that there are many others like me, especially if they’re older than me. And I’m sure even Kindle fans will admit to preferring the feel of soft, worn paper brushing by their fingers, something eBooks will never be able to deliver. And seriously, do you want the stilted, imperfect text-to-speech voice reading you bedtime stories?

We aren’t ready to go fully paperless yet. But give it a generation or two. With constant exposure, tomorrow’s children will grow up learning to read off eBooks, and we’ll be the wasteful badgery old people who think kids are crazy for not using paper. When we get there, let them make fun of us. We deserve it for making fun of old people who think instant messaging is the devil.

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