I've just got myself an ebook reader (Nook Simple Touch by Barnes and Noble) and I've been having a gala time reading novels on it.
I'd always been cynical about the quality of experience of trying to read a book in its digital avatar, but this device threw all those reservations right out of the window!
It's light-weight, sits comfortably in one hand and provides an incredible reading experience which in my opinion not only provides an experience at par to that of reading a print-and-paper book but actually surpasses it!  Now, I know this is a lot to digest for a lot of traditional book lovers, but I used to be one of them myself before I became a convert! Allow me to me explain!

The common complaints regarding ebooks is that print-and-paper gives more of a feel to the reading, complete with the feel of crinkly paper and smell of old paper and print. That they strain the eye and are in general clunky.  Modern ebook readers still don't flatter the tactile and olfactory senses like the books of old did,  but the rest of the drawbacks have been completely ironed out.
The Nook comes with something called the e-ink technology, which besides being very frugal on the battery (provides up to sixty hours of reading on a single full charge!), it is extremely friendly on the eye.  Also, the capacitive touch screen is a joy to use: the gentlest of finger-strokes are sufficient to turn a page or access other functions such as a built-in dictionary lookup tool which allows you to instantly learn the meaning of hitherto unencountered words.  A neat feature which would have appealed very much to my late grandfather is the notes feature which allows readers to highlight portions of text and to write their own 'footnotes'.  Changing font sizes is also a breeze and the page resizes accordingly thereby preserving the aesthetic beauty of a page intact and saving the user the trouble of having to scroll vertically and horizontally, to read the text.

Right, the experience is great, it's very friendly on the eyes and makes it possible to carry virtually any number of books, wherever you want to go.  What's the catch? There are a few. Firstly, the ebooks themselves. While a great many pirate sites are available on the internet which make it possible to get just about any book, without having to pay a single rupee, I'd much rather be able to buy the book, own it and enjoy it.  Hey, if the printed versions of the book cost x rupees, a digital version of the book ought to cost much less than x rupees right? Considering that there is no printing/binding/display costs involved in its sale? Um, no. That's not how things work in the ebook world.  When I tried looking for purchasable ebook of John Grisham's 'A Painted House', I found it pretty quickly. It was selling for INR 550 whereas it's print-and-paper sibling only cost INR 270! Isn't that ripping me off? Why is it so? It's because authors actually tend to be very vary of publishing their books in the electronic format simply because they believe that the internet is an evil place where people would start making copies of the electronic books and sharing/distributing them on their own without paying a cent/rupee to the author of the work.  Now, this is not a completely baseless fear, but it doesn't justify completely ignoring the electronic book market either.

Piracy is a crime.  Piracy is bad.  We all realize it, no doubt, yet most of us, if not all, would at some point in time or the other have consumed pirated products, be it in the form of an operating system or software being used with a 'cracked serial key' or license, or music (mp3) or those pirated movie DVDs which always hit the market so much earlier than the originals and at a rock-bottom prices at that!  We've also perhaps been tempted to buy or have actually bought cheap pirated paperback novels being hawked on pavements or in small roadside shops simply because these books cost a small fraction of the price of the original books.  Many a time, it's the extremely bad quality of both the print and the paper that it is laid on that dissuades some of us, including yours truly from buying the cheap knock-offs. Industry pundits, authors and self-styled experts have all held palavers and given grandiose sound bytes to the media about the need to fight piracy but nobody has actually done anything concrete to solve it. Or has anybody?

Moserbaer, the digital media giant caused a lot of eyebrows to go up when they acquired copyrights to a whole slew of Bollywood movies, both old and new.  What they did next stumped everybody: they brought out original CDs and DVDs of these movies, into the market, at rock bottom prices. I repeat: Rock bottom prices.  To give you better reference, the average price of a DVD of a Bollywood flick used to be about INR 300 ($6) at least.  Moserbaer brought out their DVDs at INR 45 ($0.95).  The pirated prints of these movies used to sell for nearly twice as much in the market!  Within no time, they virtually sent movie pirates packing and it was not long before the movie-makers themselves began seeing further profits.  The steep prices in the days of old meant few takers and hence rights to DVD sale were hardly big earners, but now movie makers earn substantially more through sales of DVDs.  The other prevalent myth in the movie industry was that early DVD releases would impact the performance of the movie in the movie halls.  Now why is this a myth? Simply because the people who don't want to go to the movie halls to watch a movie will not go to a movie hall. Period. Now, if they were to get an original DVD at the price of a pirated DVD (which often is of dreadful quality) or lesser, right around the time they'd get it in the pirate markets,  many would opt to buy the original DVD instead. Moserbaer hit upon a very basic premise and delivered an epiphany upon the world.

Now, if the same approach were to be taken by authors of books, it would be a wonderful thing indeed! Are there pirates now who pirate and sell rip-off books at rock-bottom prices? Yes. Will there be people passing around copies of ebooks for free, if ebooks are made available? Probably, but think again. If ebooks are really priced low, it would attract a lot of readers who are onto the digital bandwagon.  In the long run, the profits due to volume sales would greatly overcome the 'loss' incurred by pricing it low. When I found that the ebook version of Grisham's book was nothing short of a rip-off, I actually managed to find a pirated copy online, for free. Now, if I'd been able to find a purchasable copy at half the cost of the printed book, would I have bought it, since there is no difference in quality of a pirated ebook and an original? Yes. I would have paid up and bought it because I believe that I need to pay for something that I enjoy so much: reading an author's beautiful work. I'm sure I'm not the only person who'd do that.  Are publishers and authors listening?