I'm only 27 and like you said, the printed screen isn't the same experience. So who's buying and actually using all those e-readers. Honestly, this pace of technological change is surprising. If you asked me two or three years ago, I would had thought that Borders and the like would have been able to survive for at least another decade. Maybe two.
Me. I buy books to read them. The experience of reading them is pretty irrelevant. But if you're asking what the attraction is to the e-reader, it's pretty plain:
(1) it is convenient. I can buy a book in about ten seconds through Amazon.
(2) It is cheaper than buying regular books. In addition to the something like ten thousand or so free volumes on Amazon, most of the e-books are priced much cheaper than their paper counterparts.
(3) I can hold thousands of books in one device. Why do I want to buy, store, and carry heavy and cumbersome paper books when I can download them digitally and carry my entire library in a Kindle or an iPad?
(4) I find the experience to be better with an e-reader. On the Kindle iPad app--I don't know about the others--I can bookmark pages or passages to which I would like to return or in which I am interested, or, if I come across a word with which I am unfamiliar, I can simply put my finger over the word and the e-reader will provide me with a definition. Pretty remarkable.