I've always had a healthy technical bookshelf at home, but the problem has always been having to (remember to) cart the books from place to place. Especially challenging as a contractor.

I read a lot anyway, especially on the daily bus journey, and my conversion to an ebook reader was inevitable. I agree with the comment on the rate of reading now - my Kobo allows me to read in places where I wouldn't normally bother due to the hassle of carrying a book.

I have recently started obtaining technical manuals in both epub and print format, and now prefer to purchase from suppliers where this is an option. My introduction to Manning publications with the purchase of the excellent 'Deep Dives' volumes was a revelation. They sell in electronic, paper or both formats, and offer an excellent early access program which releases chapters as they are written. I know that Amazon do sell selected ebooks, but a dedicated sales channel would make them easier to find.

I do read the technical manuals on my Kobo, but it really depends on the content type. For reference material (eg SQL 2008 Administration) where it's really just to refresh my memory or look up an item, the Kobo is OK, but for learning material (eg. Powershell in a month of Sundays) with code samples, it is more of a challenge. I currently buy the former as ebook only, and the latter in both formats.

I find the PDF formats to be good only on traditional PCs and the larger format tablets at the moment. The current generation of ebook readers doesn't really cope well (Kobo is especially bad with these). Fortunately, the excellent free conversion/library tool Calibre does a pretty good job of translating them to epub/mobi format.

The one thing that really doesn't translate well at the moment is diagrams. With a traditional book, diagrams are placed not necessarily adjacent to the text describing them (for printing efficiency/constraints) and it is relatively easy to flip forward or back to the section of text that a diagram applies to. With ebooks, there are less of these printing constraints, but the books are inevitably just straight electronic copies of the print versions, so reading can get a bit fragmented. I don't see this changing in the future, but it would be good if the diagrams could be embedded with links to the relevant text (and vice versa).