I'm a bit surprised that some see that Kindle (or equiv E-type Reader) as a choice in that if you purchase one, you've made some sort of lifetime commitment and therefore must give up all other forms of reading and reading materials. Maybe I exaggerate, but my point is that DW and I are avid Kindle users (yes, we each have our own, yikes, oh the lack of frugality) for about 2 years now. We also make regular trips to our local library. AND, we've never passed by a used Book Store without stopping in and perusing the shelves for the offbeat, the rare, the interesting, and the unexpected.
You don't have to choose, people. All the various methods of acquiring and maintaining home libraries still apply, but now you just have another, especially efficient choice. We've found tons of totally free kindle content. We started with about 25 Thousand books, most of which we'll never read. Then we discovered Baen Books and other authors that are experimenting with giving away an early book in a series to get you interested or "hooked" to continue through the rest of that bunch of books. Even Amazon itself does that. Others have pointed out the many very low cost books available making content competitive with used books.
Used books have their place. We find books that the library doesn't have, Amazon doesn't yet carry in Kindle format, and maybe never will as they are out of print, and the enjoyment of discovering new authors by searching the shelves by type, i.e. Mysteries.
Library has it's place. I can continue reading series of books by certain favorite authors as the Library gets them in, but after the sugar has fallen of a bit. Still quite new, but I can wait a few months until demand falls off, and I only pay transport, plus as mentioned, they have all the magazines, and reference materials, and non-fiction books in stock, ready to check out for free.
Someone mentioned one of the other non-Kindle brands permits sharing between family and friends. Kindle has the same deal. We put DW's Mom on our Amazon Account, she can now download any Amazon book we've ever purchased. They permit up to (I think) six users per account to share all the content.
There are utilities already out there (I'll also check out the Calibre) that have permitted me to convert files from any of the other ebook formats to Kindle format. Some take a few minutes, but hey I'm FIRE, I have the time.
Kindle 1 takes a SD Card. Space will never be an issue unlike later versions. A very inexpensive 4Gb chip can contain a literal lifetime of books, be careful not to actually load that many.
The Wireless bit was included to allow easy downloading of new books from Amazon. A Moneymaker for them. However in so doing they included a rather kludgy but useable browser. We found we seldom used that feature on our telephones, so turned it off to the tune of $60 savings per month for the two phones. The Amazon wireless browser is free forever. Way-Cool, and sorta makes up for it's funkiness. I can read email on it in a pinch, I can even visit and read this Board!
When you plug in the USB to your computer, the Kindle just becomes another drive, making it easy to organize, transfer, and backup your content. Remember anything you find in PDF can be converted to Kindle (or mobi, more or less the same thing) I believe new revs of Kindle can read PDF natively.
When you don't need the wireless, you can just turn it off, and get easily a week's battery life. Just did that on a trip.
We use LightBright's for reading at night and not disturbing our mate. A simple clip on LED thing with a little gooseneck for positioning. Cheap and Highly Recommended.
As I said, we're two years in and quite content. I think she paid $289 and mine was a touch less as it was a refurbish, although you couldn't tell and the one-year warranty was the same.
We like 'em, but like used books, and libraries too.
