Might as well chime in as I love having an opportunity to talk about me.
I wasn't that enthusiastic about getting a Kindle (or similar) and finally made the decision after building my own home and deciding that I wanted my library to be confined to the library (aka spare room). With two of us loving to purchase new books I could see a problem coming up that I didn't want to deal with. So I took the plunge.
Now this was the original driver, but it is not why I love eReading so much as it turns out:
- I have become exposed to hundreds and hundreds or authors I would never have found in the paper realm, independent authors with talent but no publishing deal to put their books on the shelves of bookstores or libraries.
- I have found that although I can read books with smaller print, having the control over font size is an amazing benefit that I never even considered previously. I now read with a font size that is comfortable to me and not chosen by someone else.
- The fact that I can take my Kindle anywhere with several books on it is absolutely marvellous. As long as I have a wifi hotspot I can connect to (admittedly not great here), I can download my books from Dropbox if I need to which is nice.
- I found that I could buy many more books for the money.
- Getting involved in eReading actually got me involved in communities such as this one. I had never turned my reading into much of a social activity before and there is some appeal in being able to discuss books with people has become quite enjoyable. This is not specific to ebooks of course, but just something that opened itself to me because of my purchase of an eReader.
Since I purchased my Kindle my interest in reading actually increased (and I loved reading beforehand).
I'm not saying these are THE reasons to get into eReading. Some people like reading paper books and are content and that sounds fine to me. But these are some aspects of eReading that have appealed to me over time.
One thing that I've found interesting in this transition is that when talking to people who don't want to move to eReading. Suddenly I hear about the "smell of a book". I swear to God I've never heard anyone ever extolling the virtues of a book's smell until I've heard people defending paperbacks/hardbacks against eReaders. Suddenly, a whole element of reading paperbacks has surfaced that I'd never even noticed myself after years and years of reading.
I guess everyone's different, but it's one of the pro-paperback arguments I've heard that I hadn't really anticipated.