[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

But that's the problem. Ebooks aren't advertised in Europe. I mean I knew that they existed, but I like pbooks anyway.

How did you know they existed?

I'm guessing that most people that started to read ebooks were buying for example from amazon, saw that there is an ebook version, thought about the advantages, and decided that ebooks was the way to go. Then comes the idea that with a dedicated reader you have even more advantages.

Possibly. I don't have a good feel for how people come to ebooks in the first place. Amazon has certainly publicized the notion, but the idea had at least some penetration before amazon released the Kindle and Kindle editions. My local library offered ebooks in Mobipocket and PDF format, for example.

In my case, my then employer decided all IT staffers should have PDAs, and one showed up in inter-office mail. It wasn't clear what I was supposed to do with it, so I went looking for software that would assist me in my work. An early discovery was an offline HTML viewer, and software to convert HTML to the form the PDA viewer used. Much of the documentation foir the systems I dealt with was in HTML, and I could carry a documentation library in my pocket. I didn't see myself reading fiction on it, but discovered soon enough I was comfortable doing so, and things went on from there.

So what do you do if you encounter a new class? I mean given the choice between something that you know, and something unfamiliar, do you just buy the one that you know, or go home to do research?

I do research.

If I actually know anything about one - enough to consider making a purchase - I probably have some knowledge of the class.

If I have no knowledge of the class, I'm probably unaware of members of the class, and need to find out more about the general topic before I do anything else.

For me they are. It's strictly a once-a-year kind of thing, but I do buy something that costs a few hundred euros.

I suspect you are in a minority. For most folks, that's a bit beyond the "impulse purchase" level. It certainly is for me.

"Impulse purchase" tends to indicate you won't be terribly upset if it proves a bad choice. If you do that "once a year" several hundred euros purchase, and it turns out to be a bad choice, how do you feel?

But it doesn't really come out of nowhere. I've been noticing that I'm running out of space for my books, and as a PhD student in a foreign country with less than 2 years until I'm finished, I actually have to think that I'll have to pack everything up pretty soon. Switching to ebooks makes sense if I don't want the books to outweigh everything else that I own. So when I was In the store, and I saw the ereaders, I realized that that was something that I wanted to buy.

You aren't the only one with shelf space issues. My books are double rowed, and in boxes, and in an offsite storage facility.

But I buy books to keep, and don't see replacing any significant number of pbooks with ebooks. For me, ebooks are an additional format, not a replacement. (And a good number of mine are books that won't translate well to ebook format.)

If there would have been a staff member around, I would have bought an ereader and been happy with it. Like this, I chose one that is better (and more expensive), but I've waited for two months for it, and I still have a couple of weeks of waiting left.

I hope you are happy with it and it meets your needs.
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Dennis