I've been reading ebooks on my phone for a couple of years now (it's a Universal so it's got a huge bright screen!
), mostly free stuff (did you know that the works of R. E. Howard are all out of copyright?
) I love it cause I always have my phone with me, it's convenient if I get stuck somewhere and need to pass the time somehow. I am hugely tempted to get an ebook reader, because I like the idea of having several books on me at the same time, and them not taking up any shelf space when I'm done reading them - if it weren't for the portability issue, I'd prefer physical books to ebooks any day, but, like others, I'm seriously running out of space to store them.
However, I have a problem with paying as much (or almost as much) for a digital purchase as I would for a physical item. I know there's lots of things available cheaply or free (and I'll be checking out Werewolf's suggestions for sure!), the fact is that most publishers don't charge less for ebooks, at least in Europe. I don't, unfortunately, see this changing much, as the majority of the cost of the books is in the editing, typesetting, marketting, and (duh) author royalties! But I'm hoping that, soon, it'll become standard practice for publishers to heavily discount electronic versions of their back-catalogues, or maybe to start offering electronic versions of a book when you buy a hardback or something (so I can either read the book at home, or read the ebook when I'm out and about). And, of course, magazine and newspaper subscriptions WILL become a big thing, with your reader either updating over-the-air, or using something like push-web (your subscriptions downloading new content whenever you're within range of free wi-fi or connected to your PC via USB). Someone mentioned Minority Report, but most of P.K. Dick's book mention homeopapes that print out of a machine with the user's custom selection of news stories - if big news providers made a deal with Amazon or whoever else runs ebook networks they could easily do that sort of thing! (And I believe Murdoch is already building a subscription model for the online versions of his news outlets, so he'll have sometihng to easily integrate with the Kindle's network if he wants to.) This'll probably become more popular when ebooks with colour screens become common.
Anyway, the biggest thing stopping me is that, well, I tend to only read 1 book at a time and a paperback is only slightly bulkier than a Kindle. The reason I like reading on my phone is because I don't need to carry anything extra with me, so I can read "opportunistically", whenever I get a bit of time I wasn't expecting to have (train delayed, for instance). The problem with the jilted promise of convergence, however, is that if you use a single machine for making phone calls, listening to music, reading ebooks and watching movies, its battery basically won't last through the day. My phone has a back light bright enough to kill vampires with, 3 hours of reading would probably run it down. If I were listning to music at the same time it's more likely to be 2!
Still, I'll still probably get an ebook reader eventually, but not just yet - Asus announced that they're also bringing one out, as well as another manufacturer whose name I don't remember now. When those come out (prob round Christmas or shortly afterwards) it'll inevitably drive prices down, so I don't recommend to anyone to buy one just yet.
