E-Book Readers - good or bad?

Okay, I confess.
I bought an E-Book reader.
After months of saying loudly how much I love paper books, I succumbed.
Electronic publishing is here to stay, and is growing in popularity. As better and more varied titles are available to download, e-publishing will develop even more.

I bought an I-River Story Ebook reader.
Good: It is light and easy to read (not backlit like a computer screen).
Bad: No sales person in the store where I bought it knew anything about it, not even how to turn it on or charge it.

Good: I found some websites with free e-books to download (those out of copyright, mostly classics). One of the best of these is Project Gutenburg.
Bad: When I went to download, I found I couldn't read the e-pub files on my computer. I discovered I had to download software to read them (just as I need Adobe Reader to read pdf files).
Then Good again: Adobe Digital Editions is a free download that enables you to read e-pub files on your computer. Files can be sorted into a kind of online library.

Good: There is a growing choice of e-books to download.
Bad: It pays to be careful as I found some of the books had typos or were self-published (not that this is bad in itself. I have published books myself - but bad in the sense that they were obviously not edited or double-checked by anyone other than the non-professional writer).

Good: Often you can preview chapters before downloading on good sites.
Bad: Some sites won't let you download a sample unless you sign up and give all your details and, personally, I don't want to do this simply to buy a book.

Good: I downloaded and took on holidays with me recently about a dozen books and the e-reader only weighs a few grams.
Bad: I couldn't read on take off or landing because of the electronic interference thing. And one of the cabin crew asked me to turn the e-reader off about 20 mins before we landed.

Good: I can increase the font size, read in landscape or portrait or read in bed without straining my wrists or neck.
Bad: As a habitual book sniffer, I can't satisfy this need by sniffing an electronic slate (but I'll survive).

Good: I can also use the e-reader to listen to music (and it's good quality) - any cheap old earphones seem to fit if you're stuck, even airline giveaways - I can make notes on a separate function - bookmark the page so I don't have to scroll through pages to find where I last finished reading. I can catalogue files into folders as I would on my home computer.
Good and Bad: I can read both pdf and e-pub files, but the pdf simply enlarges and drops off both sides whereas an e-pub file wraps the text, which is brilliant.

Good: There are many reviews of various devices online to help you choose an e-book reader.
Bad: The instructions for how to use the reader were in a pdf format and crammed textually on the reader - and there were scant instructions on the Net, even on the I-River website but ...
Good Again: I finally discovered why they put the instructions into pdf format. I realised I could print them in A4 size and read them quite clearly. Something you can't do with e-pub files.

There are still too few books available in electronic format, but I figured I'd better learn while it's still reasonably early.
I have found that my early prejudices were unfounded. I can enjoy both mediums. Also, I've discovered that most people who swear they will never use an e-book reader have never seen or touched one.

There is a lot of talk at the moment about issues concerning publishing books in e-format, and more issue will become apparent as time goes on.
In October I'm attending two forums about e-publishing, where many of the current issues will be discussed. I'll share more of that information next month. But already editing copyright, the quality and pricing (both overpricing to consumers and underpayment to authors), DRM (digital rights managment) software that stops people copying books, writing styles (already e-publishers want shorter paragraphs, more white space but novellas may become popular again as it isn't a costly exercise getting them into e-bks as it is in paper format). And there are already apps, apparently, for i-phones etc that allow interaction by fans with the novel. I've yet to investigate this one and its implications myself.
ABC has an interesting article online about e-publishing, well worth a read. I have to agree with the title of the article, 'The Future is Now'.

cheers,
Christine