Even for people who don't read as much as I do, I think those benefits exist and that you're understating them. (Especially because my Kindle is part of the reason I read so much, not just the means by which I do it.) A Kindle is still a lot more portable than even a paperback. (I can comfortably fit it in a jacket pocket.) It's still way more convenient to be able to buy books whenever you want than to have to plan a trip to the bookstore or library. It's still a lot nicer of a reading experience than most paperbacks.

Yes, I do spend a lot of money on books every year. When you look at it in context though, that number really isn't crazy, even for something I don't end up owning. Cable TV, a Netflix account, Spotify, and going to the movies once a month are all in the same order of magnitude for similar-ish kinds of things, and you don't end up owning anything as a result of any of those, either. Reading--even when you're buying every book you read--is actually a surprisingly cost-effective means of entertainment.

And there's definitely not a 100% premium compared to me buying the physical books--that's a very silly way to do cost analysis. A sizable percentage of the actual benefit of reading a book is reading it for the first time, so losing access to it later doesn't completely devalue your purchase. Even if you were to factor in the chance of losing access to the books you've spent money on later (which is entirely reasonable), you should also be factoring in the chance that you don't ever lose access to your books. Anecdotally, events like this seem extremely uncommon, and so treating them like a certainty doesn't make much sense.

As I said, I'm not trying to defend Kindle (or any other) DRM here. I'm trying to argue against the idea that people who own and use ebook readers are idiots.

(And as for how I read so much...20 minutes both ways on the subway plus another 3-4 hours throughout the week is easily a book a week for me--I read pretty quickly--and I occasionally just sit down and decide to spend an evening reading instead of doing something else.)