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Here's a question: I got a sony reader a couple of weeks back and it's great. Just great. I love it, but I love my paper books too. I love them both in the way a 19th Century landscape artist would love this new invention called 'the camera' if he was sensible about it.

I want to support the format by buying, say, ebooks. But what I really want - and what a lot of you seem to want too - is to buy the physical book so we can stick it on our shelves, but read it either entirely or in part on an ereader. I was about to buy an ebook for (surprisingly) quite a bit less than it would have cost me new in paperback, thereby doing my bit to support the ebook market.

Then I realised I could download it off mIRC for free, but purchase the hardback for literally pennies second-hand from Amazon at an even greater saving.

That way I would have the book both in paper and in electronic form, for really not very much at all: yet the hardback would be second-hand, meaning the publishers nor the author would presumably see a penny of the money from my purchase.

Is it more morally right to just buy the ebook, something I can't loan out to friends (none of whom have ebook readers), despite the fact that a substantial portion of my existing paper collection is also second-hand? Or am I the only one who worries about these things?