When I bought my iPad, I had no intention of buying any e-books whatsoever; I stare at a screen all day, I have a huge collection of “traditional” books, and actually, I like the experience of reading a “real” book. But when I downloaded the iBooks app and saw the Winnie the Pooh book that comes with it, sitting there, all by its lonesome, I knew I had to download more books to fill all that empty shelf space. Plus, I started reading Pooh and liked the experience – the pictures were big, colorful and vivid, the bookmarking feature was nice, the page-turning animation was neat, as was the built-in dictionary and “search” option. I soon started sampling a few free books, like Homer’s The Odyssey, Poe’s Complete Poetical Work and Shakespeare’s Complete Works. Yes: All free, but have since moved on to downloading samples from a large number of books for sale, all just waiting for me to hit the “buy” button once I’ve sampled the 30-70 pages they’ve dangled in front of me. I’m still not sure what book I’m going to read through entirely via the iPad, though. Stephenson’s Snow Crash seemed appropriate, but it wasn’t available in the iBooks store, so naturally, I had to download the Kindle app (which works on the iPad), where I found the book, but then had to download even more books so that it wouldn’t be lonely on the Kindle app’s home screen. *sigh* I shudder to think what will happen if there are books that can only be downloaded via the Nook or Sony eReader.