I'm trying to figure that out. In 2005, ereader was competing with mobipocket for industry dominance, Amazon started selling weirdly-DRM'd PDFs (could only print a limited number of pages, and the verification issues were nightmarish), Baen's free library had been active 5 years and Webscriptions was a decent buying system (now, Webscriptions seems clunky; we put up with it 'cos we love Baen's books). The EBookwise 1150 was the new shiny hardware, and too expensive for me but I wanted one.

I started buying ebooks in 2005. I knew I wasn't an early adopter, but I can't imagine anyone who'd looked at the industry thinking it was on the downside.