BEIJING, Aug. 30 -- E-readers offer ease of use, but are unlikely to replace the printed page.

When I took stock of my recent reading, it occurred to me that I haven't read a single e-book this year. Actually, my e-readers have been gathering dust for even longer - like other old electronic gadgets, they've been ditched in the junk drawer.

But an e-reader is not exactly like a floppy disk or a cassette recorder from the 1980s. Only three years ago, as one of the early adopters of e-books in China, I would read one or two e-books every week, all of which had been sourced from the Web, with the genres ranging from memoirs to histories to management theories to fiction.

Fans of e-readers loved them because they were easy on the eyes, with no glare or backlighting, and had text as crisp and clear as a printed page. In a conservative culture where people are conscious of what other people think of them, the devices allowed us to devour light and "frivolous" books that we would be wary of being seen reading in the traditional format.

Sometimes, when I looked around at my bookshelves bursting with physical books, I couldn't help but think that the e-reader with a capacity for thousands of tomes was the best thing that had ever happened to my reading life.

However, the biggest allure of investing in an e-reader that could cost thousands of yuan was the promise that it would open the door to an endless supply of e-books at no cost, which played into the traditional Chinese psyche that information on the Internet should be free.

Back then, there were numerous free resource sites run by commercial websites, and supported by thousands of volunteers who scoured the Web for interesting reads.

This "sharing" practice seemed to have been vindicated by the success of several Internet giants that thrived at the expense of newspapers, as they lifted their content for free or at dirt-cheap prices. As the sites grew increasingly popular with readers, helpless newspapers were eventually forced to vie for their headlines to be posted on the homepages of the portals.

But Chinese authors have proved to be much tougher fighters, as shown by their incessant and high-profile legal tussles with Internet and technology companies over pirated content. These conflicts were usually settled by the hosts paying hefty amounts of compensation and promising to watch over piracy more carefully.

The result is that it's now increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to find best-selling e-books for free. A colleague who has followed the change closely told me that only "Web-smart" users know where to find "sharing" sites, but even they charge a price.

Unfortunately, despite the cleanup, the e-book business has remained in the doldrums as other fundamental flaws related to content and user experience came to the fore.

While e-readers are hugely successful half the world away, they have never really taken off in China, mainly because the manufacturers couldn't replicate Amazon's wide catalog of e-books and collaborative relationships with major publishers. Instead, they provide a trove of largely mundane and trashy reads, many of which are produced by struggling Internet writers.

A number of technology and telecommunications companies have tried to offer substitutes on tablets and smartphones, but the eyestrain and frequent distractions have deterred serious readers. The mobile phone operators have been known to provide romances and "Time Travel" tales online, mostly for the migrant worker market, for just several cents per read.

An official survey shows that in 2013, most Chinese adults still preferred to read printed books, and while the Chinese read an increasing number of both printed and electronic books, the rate of increase for physical volumes had outpaced that of e-books.

Another reason I rejected e-readers and e-books was that I had been cutting back on the time I spent on electronic gadgets at home after I detected early signs of addiction to them in my 5-year-old son.

Since last year, I've tried to take him to the nearby bookstore one afternoon every weekend, so he can be away from games and animated films on a tablet or smartphone. There, in the children's books section, watchful parents sit quietly against the wall, proud of what their children are doing and hoping they will stay with the books longer.

I believe none of us believes the printed book will disappear completely, at least not for our children's generation.