Hello dear mobilereaders,
I think it is time to tell a story, a story about ebooks and how they change the world...for every one of us.
I'd like to collect your stories here, how you found out about ebooks, when you started reading more and more digital content and whether you made the switchover to ebooks completely or still read pbooks on a regular basis.
I'll start with my story:
I was always a heavy reader, eating through loads of books, some from the library, but many from my local bookstore and later from amazon. When I started studying and move away from my parent's place I soon found out that my shelf-space could never keep up with my book-supply. I tried to get more books from the library, but most of the time I could not find what I wanted (it's not easy to get English books in a German library, especially relatively new ones) and so eventually gave up on the library completely.
I also tried to sell many of the books I had already finished, but found that nobody really wanted them (they are mainly paperbacks) and the fes I could sell went for a price that was probably far below the "heating value" of the paper they contained (no, I never burned books, don't worry).
About 6 years ago I started hearing about ebooks more and more, but the books I wanted were never available in digital form and so I did not take the plunge but kept watching the development.
Approximately four and a half years ago I bought a cheap PDA in a closing sale that I wanted to use for ebooks. The supply of legal ebooks was still dismal, but the Darknet and PG offered enough reading material. During that time I still read many pbooks but gradually started reading more and more on the little PDA. The low battery life and small (320x240) screen frustrated me from the start, but it was all I had. While I was searching the web for alternatives, I stumbled on mention of the "Librié" and when I searched for more information on that device I discovered mobileread.com
That was somewhere between 3.5 and 4 years ago.
At first I browsed the forums passively, searching for information on the Libiré at first which I discounted quickly because of the fact that it was hard to get in Germany, expensive and not really very user-friendly.
Not much later however, the first rumours of the iRex Iliad and the Sony Reader (Librié 2 bascially) started to surface.
Fired by my curiosity about eink and the possibilities it held for the ebook market I decided to join mobileread.com and actively take part in discussions to find out more about this upcoming technology.
About half a year later I owned my first eink device, the iRex Iliad and could finally get rid of my crappy little PDA reading machine and enjoy the benefits of a large, nicely contrasted and eye-friendly reading machine.
The Iliad was rather expensive, 650€ plus shipping, and that heavy price was part of the reason for a vow I toot there and then...a vow to never buy a paper book again. To be entirely honest, I have broken that vow a few times over the last few years, mainly for books from a series that I had started and could not get the next volume as ebook, but paper books moved from nearly 100% of my reading material to nearly 0.
I wrote that the purchase of the Iliad was the big turning point, and in a way it was, however, in those early days there was still a lot of hassle associated with ebooks, you had to convert everything to PDF because that was the only working format on the Iliad back then and that was manual work, no predefined templates, no helpful tools from iRex.
Saying that I spent as much time preparing books than I did grading them would be overdoing it, but it sure sometimes felt that way...
Also, back int hose days a good amount of my reading materials came from the darknet since the Iliad could not read any of the popular DRM format and the supply of books in these formats was also still rather weak.
Along the way I got the STAReBOOK as a review device (having risen to Editor status on mobileread.com by then) and was very fascinated by that device because it was a lot faster and slimmer (in both shape and function) than the feature-rich but also slow,battery-weak and cumbersome Iliad, however, the company vanished without a trace shortly after launching the STAReBOOK and the promised firmware update for the device which should have fixed many of the bugs and intruded new features and support for more ebook formats never happened. So I soon returned to my trusty old Iliad...
The biggest step (in my opinion) happened later that year, when iRex offered a firmware update that added mobipocket support to the Iliad! Thanks to this move, I was finally able to get almost al my books in ebook format...and I could get them legally. This was the biggest step forward...
Many things have happened since, the Cybook Gen3 was launched, the Kindle flickered it's way into existence and brought ebooks even closer to mainstream, my STAReBOOK found a new function as a Cybook Gen3 (same hardware, different firmware...nice...^^) and I can now comfortably browse online stores like booksonboard, choose what I want to read and have it on either of my reading devices in a few minutes, faster and easier than going to the bookstore and buying it there..and cheaper too most of the time...
I have not pirated an ebook for a long time, there is no need anymore, I have not bought a pbook for a long time either (if it's not available as ebook I don't read it...that'll teach the narrow-minded publishers...) and I'm a happy, fully-converted ebook lover.
Of course there are things that could still do with some improvement, many books are still not available as ebooks, the eink devices still have their shortcomings, but all in all I think ebooks are finally (after amyn fals tries) ready for prime-time and the mass market!
THE END!
Please excuse my lengthy ramble, if you are still awake then now would be the right moment to sit back, think back to your first encounter with ebooks and tell us all about it!
Thanks!