I'm new to Macs also.. my husband got one last year and I occasionally use it.. My husband bought a "SmartDisk" USB floppy drive at the Apple retail store when he bought his Ibook but we only used it a couple of times, for transferring a few files from our Windows machine.
Later on we got a Sandisk (ImageMate SDDR-31) USB Compact Flash card reader, to use with our digital camera. It was an old model card reader we got in a camera shop and the included software worked on our Win95b machine's version of USB. As luck would have it, the same CF card reader also worked natively on Mac OSX without needing to install any software.
A CF card reader is also a writer so I've used it to copy and transfer files from the Windows machine to the iBook. I got a separate 128 MB flash card and use it just for file transfers since the digital camera-formatted cf card causes iPhoto to open on the iBook. The card reader is always connected to the Windows pc now, and I use it for data backup since we don't have a CD-writer on it and floppies are just too limited space-wise. The CF card reader shows up on the pc as " Removable Disk (D )" in My computer and is just like having another hard drive as far as copying files goes.
Flash card readers are pretty cheap, around $20 - $30 - the flash cards can easily cost more than the reader, although they're getting cheaper.
This Apple page lists some media readers that work worth Iphoto:
http://www.apple.com/switch/questions/p ... meras.html My Sandisk reader isn't listed but it worked anyway

If you have an Apple retail store in your area I would check there.
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