From the prospective of a peasant.
It appears that the most important thing that scholars want is immutability. A dead tree copy of a book can't be changed, so they can go on endlessly about which dead tree copy is "better" than any other dead tree copy (I know where all of the errors are, and you don't, so there!). Even though, eventually, dead tree copies wear out, are burned up in fires, are carelessly discarded, or sold off to make space, etc., etc., they don't change. Therefore, an electronic copy is unacceptable because: 1. Maybe it is not the exact representation of a dead tree copy. This is entirely unacceptable because "my" dead tree copy is better than all of the others. 2. Its URL might change and then I couldn't find it. 3. Worse yet, the URL doesn't change but the text does. (See point 1.) It appears that we need to modify the PG web site to include checksum and CRC data on each of our files to provide a mechanism of verifying that they have not been nefariously modified after download, so "my" electronic copy can be judged the same as "your" electronic copy. I fall back to my earlier point: What would be better when you're submitting research than to include a copy of every item of source material? This is not done with dead trees because we do not have a mechanism to instantly create an exact duplicate of a given piece of material for free in the dead tree world. Such a mechanism does exist in the electronic world. When academia wakes up to this fact, maybe their negativity toward electronic copies will lessen somewhat.