E-Books
I’ve resisted e-books for a long time.
At first it was because the formatting frankly sucked (and still does for the most part) and because I couldn’t quite swallow the idea of reading an entire novel on my computer – never mind that, as an avid reader of fanfiction, I read extremely long stories on a regular basis on my computer screen. I used them in grad school a couple of times and once tried to read one of Cory Doctorow’s books that way, but didn’t get past the first 20 pages. In hindsight though, it may have been the book. 
What’s gotten me into e-books, finally, is category romance novels. I’ve mentioned my addiction before but what I haven’t mentioned is the severe lack of book storage I have in my apartment. In short, I have one bookcase. And four boxes full of books, and several small piles sitting on the floor. We’re approaching crisis period, so clearly I needed to come up with a solution that would allow me to have my romance novels and not trip over them every morning when I got out of bed.
Clearly, I needed to try e-books again.
As with all things related to the computer, getting the software to work was the major hurdle. I don’t have a reader, so I was buying in pdf format. Which is fine, except that Adobe hasn’t updated their e-book software to work with the latest version of Mac OS X (abbreviated rant: Leopard has been out for six months and isn’t THAT serious a departure from the last version. Get with it.) so I had to pretend to be using 10.2, download an older version of Acrobat Reader, and use it with that one. Then I was in business, although its still wonky: it takes three times to successfully download a book. The first time I get a server error, the second time it crashes Acrobat, and the third time it finally works.
In any case, I currently have a collection of books on Acrobat Reader that include Australian diamond tycoons, six or seven sheiks, and overbearing Italians, and I’m not tripping over the books or providing any more of a hiding place for the cat then I already had.