I see the number of companies making e-readers has surpassed 20 and the number of e-readers is even greater, and the profits from e-book sales for Amazon and everybody else are on the rise, and a meteoric rise at that - something like 50% market growth a year !
So what puzzles me is why ? I guess this depends on the culture in the part of the world in question but in general relatively few people read books willingly, and out of those that do it has been my experience that the majority don't want to read metallic gadgets instead (myself not included there of course). And of those very few that do read and do like gadgets enough to not miss paper every single one (including me) has/wants an e-reader for the single reason that you can read a million books on it for 0$ (unless you really want to pay for them out of the goodness of your heart and donate to the poor rich people who write them that is) while paper books cost real money, and lots of it where I come from. If I had to pay for digital files the same amount of money I pay for real books, I would never have bought an e-reader.
Getting to the point - most of the prospective market are probably Americans, and 99% of Americans for reasons completely puzzling to me (might it be capitalistic indoctrination ?) actually believe you should pay for copying digital files from the Internet (like books, movies, music, games, apps...) so why the heck buy and use e-readers ? If the books aren't free the only advantage as far as I can see is portability ? And still e-readers are becoming more popular every day ?
This is most puzzling, so if you happen to be a capitalist anti-pirate pig
please enlighten me as to your reasons for buying an e-reader ?