Plus, I get all my textbooks for school used and very cheap, then sell them later, so I’m not spending too much money on them anyway (after re-selling, total loss last semester was $80).

I know I’m not living very simple, but my books are my vice.

The Kindle arrived yesterday, but I did not have time to open it and charge it up until the evening. I knew I would not have the best network coverage for the Whispernet, but to my chagrin, I can’t use this wireless feature at all from my house. I will have to drive about 3 miles to get a connection to download the things I have purchased from Amazon. For the price I paid, I am considering returning it.

It also bothers me that it is made in China.

Otherwise, I like it so far.

So if you like classics at all, try your luck at projectgutenburg.com. Thousands of public domain books in kindle friendly formats. All free.

My H got an iPhone as his Christmas present and I wanted the Kindle.

I have a folder with a lot of free books I have downloaded, and I have purchased 1 @ $6.99 to download when the Kindle arrives. I am a little frustrated that many of the books I want to keep, can’t be purchased for the Kindle, but I have clicked on the link to the publishers, so maybe this will change.

I am really trying to downsize the amount of books we have in the house for space and dust reasons (we live in TX – dust world). My house is too cluttered after 23 years here, and books are one of the main clutter problems we have.

I’m not, personally, an ebook fan as I my PDA screen is too small, and we don’t have an affordable large-format reader available here in Australia.

Budget is an issue of course and the solution that works for me is to use a bit of a mix – supporting favorite authors (especially romance authors or literary authors) by buying their work, using the library for the big name authors or for rarely-used reference texts, plus some secondhand novels as well. On my PDA are some classics and a few short stories from an independant epublisher.

You should be aware that most of these are a rip off. The books are available for free from various sources on the internet and work great on the kindle. I was able to load up my wife’s kindle with a ton of classic literature (bronte, tolstoy etc) which she absolutely loves.

http://www.43folders.com/2008/.....zon-kindle

One thing that amazed us about the kindle and that you can’t put a price on is the free wireless web/wiki address.

We just took a cross country trip and it was great to use the kindle to look up the history on every little town we passed and find out the history of roadside attractions such as “The Thing?”. We where amazed that even in the middle of no where, when our cell phone dropped off the net the kindle was still able to get a signal.

I’ve had mine for nearly a month now, and you would have to pry it from my fingers to get it away from me.

I’ve read 5 fiction and 1 non-fiction books as well multiple PDF and Word docs for work so far. I’ve loaded several PDF manuals so that I have them for easy reference or study. I’ve used it to check my e-mail and to do the occasional light web-surfing.

It fits in my purse and goes with me everywhere so that I always have something to read when I’m waiting. The ability to have a variety of reading material with me all the time in one small package is so wonderful.

Yes, it’s convenient. Our main reason for buying them, however, is to pare down our extensive collection to the books we really love and treasure, and send the rest of the books to be loved by someone else.

It’s also a great uncluttering tool, because there are so many books I held onto “just in case” I ever wanted to read them. The Kindle is almost an emotional crutch here–and in the case of classics, it’s definitely cost-effective.

Also, since I sold my book, I’ve become a lot more aware of how the used book market hurts authors. So on principle, I’m buying more books new. But I would say I’m still saving money, because reading the free first chapter has kept me from buying a lot of books that I would otherwise have bought and hated.

But, I also have developed an allergy to old books, robbing me of the pleasure of browsing in second-hand bookstores and forcing me to recognize that I could no longer read most of the books I owned. For the first time in my life I did a major purge of my books, an emotional experience, to say the least.

I’m also accumulating chronic ailments as I age, and reading in bed can become painful. The back-lit Palm is a strain for me to read on.

I look forward to owning a Kindle. I don’t see that it has to be an either/or commitment, unlike many of the responses I’ve read here. None of the joys of “real” books have to be foregone because of the addition of being able to read on a Kindle.

I would consider an iPod Touch, but I’m really not a fan of reading on a back-lit screen (which is why I tend not to read on my computer and why I’m way behind on all the PDFs I’ve downloaded).

So I’m putting off the Kindle for a while.