Can your Android run the Kindle app? There are versions of that for just about everything. And it can read PDFs in addition to its own formats. I do it all the time with my own work.
I just read Firefly: The Official Companion, Vol. 1. Good stuff - the complete scripts, interviews with cast and crew, pictures of models, sets, costumes and props, etc. That Brunching Shuttlecock chart - very tiny and illegible on on your TV screen - is the readout on Dr. Simon Tam’s laser probe. Kudos to prop masters Randy Eriksen and Chris Calquhoun.
I’ve been guilty of it (Star Trek, Star Wars, David Eddings), so obviously I approve, in general. That doesn’t mean I’m blind to the majority-dreck quality of it, though.
The idea that fan fiction writers should write original stories with original characters and be a “real writer” is completely missing the point. Fan fiction is a way to engage with the fandom, the source material, the characters, speculate, go on wild “what if?” tangents (often seen in normal discussions of the material), and just to have fun. Or do something insane, like have the Joker hunt down and kill every single teletubby.
From a historical story telling perspective humans have been reinterpreting their cultural myths and spinning off settings and characters forever. A lot of what Christians think of as their religion comes from The Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost, basically Bible fanfiction. Virgil wanted to know what happened to Aeneas after Troy fell, so he wrote the Aeneid (Homer’s estate should have sued his pants off). Everything is a remix of something else, some just do a better job of filing off the serial numbers. With the advent of the internet anyone can do it.
It’s a good thing modern IP rights didn’t exist back then. Disney would barely exist. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead? You’ll be dead after Shakespeare’s lawyers get their teeth in you.
It’s funny to me when a property lasts so long that fans that watched/read it as kids grow up and become official writers/artists for it and people complain about it being canon fanfiction (only if they don’t like it; “fan fic tier” is always an insult).
Back in the 70’s, my sister had a book of published (!) fanfic, regarding the Star Trek universe, all short stories. One of the stories had to do with, not the Star Trek characters, but the actors that portrayed them. Nimoy looked into the whatever it’s called that Spock always peered into to get answers, wondering, “What am I actually looking at?”
Cute.
Back long before the internet I read and submitted to fanzines for 20 years. Some of it was published, and a lot was not. It was a fun thing to do.
I enjoy fanfic if it’s well-written and the plot isn’t basically a hard-core porno. Sadly, these are somewhat difficult to find, and the amount of people who publish things demonstrating their inability to spell basic words, punctuate, or follow basic grammar rules is pretty appalling. But some people put together stuff that is almost as good as whatever they’re spinning of off, and I enjoy finding those.
What squicks me out is RPF. I don’t have any problem with whatever stories people want to make up about fictional characters, even if it’s content or plot that I wouldn’t actually read myself. Want to publish 15 chapters of NCIS fanfic of Tony DiNozzo’s secret life as a furry? Knock yourself out, even though I won’t read it. Make it about Michael Weatherly, though, and splash it all over the internet, and it strikes me as profoundly weird and somehow wrong.
Visit to a Weird Planet, and its counterpart, Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited. In one, the actors end up on the real Enterprise, and the other the actual crew ends up on a soundstage filming Star Trek.
I’ve read some fanfic that was at least as well written as the average episode of most TV shows. The erotic ones, I suspect may be pros moonlighting because they just enjoying writing erotica. The best was of Star Trek:TNG. They were visiting a misogynist planet, and the men were supplied women; it was made clear by their hosts that if they didn’t have sex, the women would be beaten. The writer did an excellent job of writing each character’s scene - Pickard annoyed at being forced to engage in sex with someone who had no choice, Riker enthusiastically making the best of a bad situation and introducing the concept of the female orgasm to the planet, etc. It was better than most of the episodes Roddenberry wrote for TOS.
I wish the producers of porn parodies would search for erotic fanfic, and hire those writers. Of course, this sort of presumes that the porn stars could act, but some of them had excellent set, costumes and likenesses. The WKRP parody was actually pretty decent, except they had couplings that make no sense, like Bailey and Les.
The book was Star Trek: The New Voyages. I still have my copy, along with the sequel. Many of those authors went on to become pros (or already were at the time). Good stuff.
To answer the title of the thread, “not at all”. My daughter tried to get me to read some. Everything I came across was bad, worse that the worst hack novel that I had ever read - and I’ve read some of L. Ron’s Mission Earth novels. She assures me that there are gems among the trash, but I’d rather not wade through the trash to find them.
Oh. At first I didn’t get what I meant about slashfic, but now I do. I meant, I don’t get why anyone would use their real names when reading or writing slashfic.
Of course I understand why people write it and read it, even if it does nothing for me.
I rarely read it. Usually it seems too unlike the source material to appeal to me as a fan of the source material.
There are exceptions.
ETA: I heard of it back in the late 1990’s, I suppose. It sounded like a neat idea. More of this thing I like? Yay! But then it wasn’t.
I wade through quite a lot of the stuff. But then, I’m a sociologist by schooling; we’re all weird. 
Sturgeon’s Law applies to fanfic, as it does to everything else. Most of the good stuff is produced by people who want practice at writing, and get better over time. The other 90% is by people who just have this thing in their head and want to hammer it out onto a keyboard so it will clear out and leave more room for other thoughts, like where they put their car keys down last. They’re the story equivalent of those long rambling debates geeks will sometimes have over which one of their favorite superheros would win in a fight. The point isn’t really the production of a finished story – it’s spending that time thinking about and engaging with a piece of media you love.
And actually, gaffa, some of the erotic fanfic writers do end up writing real porn. I work for a small publisher that specializes in sci-fi/fantasy/steampunk/generally geeky erotica. The only one of our authors I can think of right off the top of my head who didn’t start out in fanfic is the lawyer who wrote an entire smutty book more or less because he’d been dared to do it. 
Our published authors are also known to write “fanfic” for their own creations, sort of – usually it’s a scene or a side story that unexpectedly turned out well when written, but ultimately didn’t fit into the novel, and had to be cut. They post it on their own, or we include it as an extra in later editions of the book.
A lot of our authors also still write for various fandoms, some under their real names but mostly not. I know the Editor-in-Chief – herself the author of about a squintillion erotic romances, plus author/editor of some non-fiction – is active in Harry Potter fandom. We’ve also got at least one author who was kinda-sorta writing fanfic for her own universe, and then ultimately had it published. She writes some fairly trippy urban fantasy to begin with, but her main series is marketed as YA. I gather when she floated the idea of erotica with her publisher, they just about had a heart attack, so she brought it to us instead.
I like it and have written some. I’m especially fond of crossovers.
What I like is lets say you see a movie or tv show which has a crappy ending (in your opinion). Then you can write one better and see what people think. Its fun.
BTW. On Youtube check out “Batman vs. Darth Vader”
The one thing that does creep me out isn’t so much the Rule 34 stuff, but the real person fan fiction. Stuff about celebrities, like athletes, actors, musicians, etc. It just seems a wee bit stalkerish. Unless it’s parody or something like that, I find it really cringe inducing.
I’ve also read arguments that it’s a way for women and minorities to “take back” and add diversity (sexual and otherwise) to media that seems to too often dismiss and exclude said women and minorities in favor of the angst of straight white dudes.
I look around at TV and movies these days and I see the strength in that argument.
I’ve often wondered if the real screenwriters and such ever look at fan fiction archives for either ideas or to find out if such a story has been thought of before. And if so, I wonder if they would have to pay that author something?
That’s a good way to get caught in a lawsuit.
If you must do something like that, contact the fan-author and get some kind of written permission. (And…heh…I have done exactly that!)
I dabble in fanfic myself…
For fans of zombies and Bronze Age Marvel: http://archiveofourown.org/works/1115655
Warehouse 13 and Theodore Sturgeon: http://archiveofourown.org/works/1115514
Feedback welcome. 