I generally do a lot of my reading on the computer screen and I quite frankly find the 'search' feature to be very convenient, especially when reading books of multi-layered levels of complexity where a handful of characters are thrown into the fray.
Still, there is unquestionably a marked difference between reading on a screen versus paper and being a computer science major, I'm currently writing a program to try and simulate the 'look and feel' of reading a physical book via rendering a e-book in a three-dimensional OpenGL environment.

