It’s the device, absolutely.
This answer is partly based on my history with ebooks. I’ve always read a lot but I came to ebooks quite by accident. I got my first Pocket PC in 2000 – a Compaq iPAQ 3630. I don’t think I’d ever even heard of ebooks then but the IPAQ package included a few coupons for free ebooks in Microsoft Lit format. It took me a while to actually get around to reading them (I couldn’t imagine wanting to read on something that smallI) but as soon as I tried them I was hooked.
Along with MSLit books I bought books from PeanutPress/PalmReader/ereader, Mobipocket, the late, great fictionwise, and a few publisher websites. Like Harry I bought lots of Agatha Christie from fictionwise, first the Miss Marples and Poirots and later, during the firesale, almost everything else.
I wished that more books, both current and backlist, were available as ebooks, and I wished that I didn’t need so many different apps and DRM systems to keep track of, but it was a small inconvenience. I was building up a sizable library. Ebooks didn’t take up any physical space, so moving to a new city didn’t require giving away half of them. I could keep my whole library forever…...
Well, that was a rude awakening. I don’t know how I could have been quite so short-sighted. I couldn’t imagine going back to print books. I thought about just cutting my losses, giving up on my thousand or so books and starting over, this time with a large company that would stay in business (although it didn’t help me that Microsoft was still in business). Maybe Borders would be a good choice; I liked their stores.
Thank goodness for Calibre and Alf. And the Mobileread forum. I was able to rescue almost every one of my books.
But the fact that I’d bought a few Mobipocket format ebooks from Amazon before they changed to their new format and they’d refused to convert them (I did email them about it) made me think less of them. At least Barnes and Noble had done their best; most of my Fictionwise books were carried over to my Barnes and Noble account (I realize that was USA only).
I now download and strip DRM as soon as I buy any book, and I like being able to shop at multiple places – partly because I don’t want Amazon to become the only one left if I can help it.
Because I buy ebooks from multiple places and sideload everything from Calibre, adding series info, and sometimes new covers and descriptions, I don’t care anything about the convenient Amazon cloud. That being the case, I choose by device (based on hardware and software and fuzzy emotional response but not on ecosystem). I know Amazon’s customer service has the best reputation but since I’ve never needed to return a Kobo or Nook I don’t worry too much about it.
Preserving my books is my number one goal in stripping DRM but explaining my response to the poll (at length) has also reminded me how great it is that now I CAN choose my ereaders solely by device.
