The difference between a book and a tablet is not the content, but rather the delivery of said content.

Tablets can be more convenient. They are travel friendly, not as bulky, and are multi-purpose.

Books, on the other hand, have the advantage of being something that you not only read. You feel the weight of it, you get to hear the sound of pages turning and you can smell the paper. That is more than just content, that is the atmosphere. You also get to keep books when you are done reading them. I remember reading “Norwegian Wood” by Murakami for the first time when I was in high school and I remember the cover art and carrying the book around, reading a few pages when I felt like it, and for some reason I got attached to the book.

I switched to reading e-books on a tablet a couple of years ago and I could never go back. Here's a typical scenario.

I see an author discuss his book on Charlie Rose's program. I download the first chapter free in about thirty seconds. If I like it, I buy the book. I can now read it on any device, anywhere in the world, anytime, and it will always sync up to where I left off.

If I want, I can get the audiobook version as well and THAT WILL SYNC with my e-book. Now I can keep reading in my car and the supermarket. I'm the one who doesn't mind traffic or long lines. When I travel, an entire library comes with me. I'll never again have to buy junk fiction at an airport.

And then there's this remarkable feature: Non-fiction books and textbooks can be updated in minutes to the latest edition. Text can be searched, the font size changed to suit, and definitions can hover over a cursor when desired.

The advantages are just too many; once you get used to having them, paper books seem inadequate.

I never lose books anymore. I often re-read books. With my e-reader, I don't have to search my whole house trying to figure out where I put a particular book.
I used to travel with several books in my suitcase. I have often had the horror of finishing all of my books while traveling and being stuck with whatever was on the shelf at the airport.

With an e-reader, I have about 1,000 books on my reader that I can re-read or I can go and buy a new book and have it 30 seconds later.

(1) Any book that contains images will have far better quality images than can be displayed on a tablet.

(2) You can own a book, whereas even if you ‘buy’ an e-book, it will cease to work once the company that sold it to you goes out of business.

(3) In connection with (2), there is a possibility (in fact, a very high probability) that even if humanity survives, a thousand or two years from now everything that exists in the present day will seem as ancient and inaccessible as things that existed a thousand or two years ago. Given that near certainty, any e-books that are not also published as good-quality real books will have ceased to exist, and only real books will remain as a record of our existence. For instance, if not for papyrus scrolls and hieroglyphs carved into ancient Egyptian tombs and monuments, we would know almost nothing about Egyptian history; whereas we have a very good idea of what happened during nearly 5000 years of that history. Similarly, almost all of what we know about ancient Greece comes to us from physical papers still extant, or copied by Roman or Moslem historians; and we know a lot about ancient Greece because of that. A thousand or two years from now, even if current CDs and DVDs and tablets still exist, the way they are encrypted will make them completely indecipherable and will provide no information at all about our civilization, save that it relied on useless ways of preserving information. But if real books were found, sooner or later, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, they would be translated into legible text.

That doesn’t mean that I want to malign e-books. All of my novels and short stories are available as e-books since that’s the main way that books are sold nowadays. But physical copies are also available for those who want to be able to have the book, as well as read it, and to ensure at least a remote possibility that the stories will still be around, long after I am gone.

Final Note: You may have heard about a recent resurgence in vinyl records, as opposed to CDs, for music and such. There are two reasons for this, the main one being the fact that CDs compress the musical data and a truly good audio system can produce better sound from a record than from a CD; but also, in the distant future, the grooves on the physical records will allow their contents to still be listened to if someone realizes what they represent; while CDs will be completely useless unless they can be unencrypted.