Other than the occasional technical book, I refuse to buy e-books when reading for pleasure.
After spending all day in front of a screen, the last thing I want is another screen in my face when trying to relax with a good book at the end of the day.
After spending all day in front of a screen, the last thing I want is another screen in my face when trying to relax with a good book at the end of the day.
E-Readers are one of those technologies that I'm completely unconflicted and wholly supportive of. E-books should be priced better though, to account for the inability to lend them out to people.
You can also get a decent amount of stuff from various Amazon programs, like Kindle Unlimited. The selection isn't always perfect, but it's not terrible either.
And of course, there are always slightly less legitimate venues for obtaining free ebooks. Your morality may vary, but I'm not sure I see a problem with torrenting an ebook if I already own the paper copy. (Thankfully, some publishers are starting to be reasonable about this, like Manning, and providing a free download if you've got the purchase code from the paper book. Others are not so great - I've tried to buy the ebook versions of some of my Apress books, and the questions that they ask to verify that you own the book, i.e. what page is figure 7-3 on?, cannot be answered correctly using the page numbers from the print edition...). There's also not the same level of organization by book publishers as the MPAA and RIAA.
Poor formatting, usually, though even commercial ebooks are often bad at that (another reason I don't like them) and at least the proofreading isn't as bad as the commercial ones. Tolerable in some cases—I've read a few.
But if it's a work originally written in a language you don't read, the best translations (easiest to read, most accurate, best balance of the two, take your pick) are usually still covered by copyright. The quality difference between those and what's available from PG is often large.
I did recently crack a small section of my kindle's screen when I dropped something heavy on it, and now the backlight bleeds through the small hole with the intensity of a thousand suns.... But before then, it was very comfortable, and I'll probably buy a replacement.