Do you have an ereader?

[Irulan]

My partner got me a Nook when I went to the hospital to have surgery a month ago. While I'll always have paper books (and friends of mine run bookstores, which are lovely places and I want to do my share to keep them in business), there are things that I really like the Nook for:

• Ease of downloading samples. I'm often hearing about a good book, look it up on the B&N site, get a free sample, and read through 15-50 pages for free getting a good feel for it before buying.
• Small form factor. Very handy, easy to hold and to operate (I have the touch-screen B&W one).
• Very pleasant to use and easy on the eyes.
• Free ePub books and PDFs render reasonably well. Project Gutenberg ePub are very nice. PDFs can be a mess, but often are quite usable.

As another poster said, if you're outside the US, the Kindle is the better choice. I wanted to go with something that is a tiny bit more open to non-DRM books and a tiny bit less dominant market-wise, and the Nook's a nice device.

There are also other reasons to dislike ebook readers in general, such as the difficulty sharing books within one's family, copying/pasting quotes (both of these should be *easy* with electronic resources but the DRM is in the way), leafing forward/back a few pages, knowing how many pages are left in a chapter etc. Overall, I enjoy the experience as something that gets me to read in situations where I wouldn't have.

You can use Stanza software (free) to clean up or reformat PDFs.