[JulianL]

Hello everyone. I'm pretty excited to find this forum because it seems to be just what I was looking for.

I've been reading ebooks since 1999 when I got my first Palm V device and downloaded some old classics from Project Guttenberg. I'm a computer scientist by training and have been tinkering with technology for the last 40 years but I still vividly remember the moment when I started reading that first text on my Palm V, it was the one time in my life when it really did feel to me as if something had jumped straight out of the pages of science fiction and into the real world; it was the most thrilling technological moment in my life.

I subsequently started buying commercial titles from eReader.com (now part of Barnes & Noble) so I have a decent library in secure eReader format. I've just moved to the iPhone as my handheld device, which is what I use for 90% of my reading, so I'm in the process of converting some of my titles across to ePub format and I'm also really hoping that Apple do a good job of capturing commercial content for the iBook format, and without all the geographical restrictions that have made eReader/B&N almost worthless to me now as a source of new material.

I discovered these forums via the Calibre web site and I expect that I'll be spending a lot of time on the Calibre sub-forum getting advice on converting my existing books (the table of contents seem to always cause me grief).

I will state for the record that I fully support the electronic publishing industry and everything that I'm converting was legally purchased by me. I even often pay for commercial versions of classics (e.g. £1.49 for a Collins Classic) rather than getting a free Guttenberg download because I want the publishers to see revenue opportunities and to start uploading not just new releases but also more of their back catalog of out-of-print titles.

- Julian