I am a typical late adopter. I normally wait for bugs to get ironed out and for prices to go down. So it took me a while to move from vinyl to CD and from VHS to DVD. One of the issues was needing to rebuy stuff I already owned in the older format or go through a lot of time-consuming work changing it myself. I only adopt early if I see a big advantage in doing so.
I suppose that with ereaders I am a medium adopter. I thought about getting one a little while back but was put off by the prices. It is only because of two conditions in my own life that I was pushed towards thinking about it at all:
- having too many books and needing too much shelf space;
- travelling a lot and wanting to cut down on luggage weight.
Now those conditions are not going to apply to most book readers.
Even with that as motivation I hesitated about the expenditure on an ereader. Amazon's launch of the relatively cheap Kindle 3 swung it for me.
For people who are not gadget freaks and who just buy the odd book as the fancy takes them, an ereader is just not a must-have toy.