It's odd, but it feels to me like e-books have always been here, but if I think way back, I think Palm Pilots and iSilo are responsible for my interest in e-books. I used to clip all my web reading and read it on the go. That's how I discovered MobileRead... even in the very early days, Alex had all this amazing help and so many tips for getting content on your PDA. And, remarkably, everyone here was really nice to each other and very knowledgeable.
Then the content I read on my PDA just grew and evolved to things like books and, well, anything I could put on the device! Especially as decent rechargeable batteries and hi-res screens came onto the scene. Now I still read mostly on my Treo smartphone, but the Sony Reader e-ink device has expanded my reading. Thanks to PDFRead, I can read pdf files on it when I have my glasses handy, and even books scanned without OCR can be read that way. That's something that just can't be done on a PDA. Unfortunately, it isn't with me all the time or have a backlight like my phone, so they complement each other well.
I still enjoy paper technical books, but for straight novels there's nothing as fun and convenient as an e-book. And until I started reading e-books, I think I had pretty much stopped reading books for fun. Now I always seem to be reading a book or audiobook (on Pocket Tunes loaned from the library). Even when I can only sneak a few minutes here and there when I'm waiting for something.
So for me, as with many others I suspect, it's e-books (and the enthusiasm of others here at MR, and the growing availability of e-books such as in the upload section on this site) that's directly responsible for me doing a lot of reading for fun. Work reading will always exist, but fun reading is another joy altogether.
