Well, save for Anti's post, the response to ebooks is unequivocally negative here
I primarily intend to use it for a purpose true to its name - reading ebooks, i.e. books / documents that haven't been published on paper in the first place. One reason for this is that I don't have a printer, but I have to do a lot of copying or printing since everybody these days is sending their seminar handouts via email and doesn't bother anymore to hand out paper copies. Printing for me always means a twenty-five minute bycicle ride to the nearest copyshop, or even longer if I want to have them at the university's expense
Also, I have to copy a lot for myself, manily essays or parts of books, but now we have some newfangled contraption here that allows you to make a PDF file of your scan and copy it to a USB stick. I have used it only occasionally, but I can imagine an ebook reader would come in really handy here.
Another thing: Game manuals. Since this, after all, is a subsim gaming site (which may be shocking news for all of those who thought it was a politics forum
) you may feel with me that I'm royally pissed off by the fact that most (or virtually all) games these days don't come with a printed manual anymore. As I've said, I don't have a printer, but even if I had one, I simply wouldn't see the point in printing out whole manuals considering the cost. The last
printed manual I've actually owned was that of Dangerous Waters, which I ordered on this site and had it shipped all the way to Germany. I mean let's face it: RTFM is a prerequisite to simulation gaming. I even think that reading the manual and learning the sim step by step is actually half the fun of it. And a great number of manuals that include a tutorial assume that you have it at hand while following the sim while it runs, which simply can't be done in a proper way if I only have a PDF. Open the game, open Acrobat reader, start the tutorial, swith to reader, read a few lines, switch back to game, switch back to reader because I've already forgotten what it says, repeat ad nauseam ... Who hasn't made that experience? It would be so much easier if I simply loaded the manual onto my ebook reader. I had two screens and would save the cost and hassle of printing.
And finally: All of those texts freely available in the internet. I'm not talking about book pirating, but about all of those classics that have been made available through project Gutenberg, the Perseus Digital library and the like.
With all the drawbacks in mind (being more of an indoorsy guy that doesn't go to the beach anyway, or likes to scribble - not even marginally - on his electronic equipment), do some of the points make sense to you?
Jeez, I think I'm spent for tonight