[Crispy's Critter]

I love my kindle, take it everywhere I go. I opted for the one with free 3G for life, and can purchase books anywhere in the world that a 3g signal can be found. It also can hook to wifi hotspots, so you can browse the net. That being said the browsing capabilities aren't great, and a bit of a PITA on some sites, as in order to read you have to zoom the text, but then you end up continuously scrolling side to side. It will probably improve later on, as the browsing is in the 'experimental' stage right now. Also nice on the kindle is a small keyboard on the bottom, which makes it really easy to search for books in the store, or wherever you need to type anything. It also has text to speech, which is fairly good, although not perfect, so if you want to just veg and listen to a story it's kind of cool. I don't use these features a lot, but have on occasion. Also as people have mentioned, don't underestimate the importance of being able to read in sunlight. My friend has an older lcd reader, and he has mentioned that even in places with florescent lighting he can have trouble seeing his screen. The Kindle does display pictures, but they are black and white.

No matter which reader you end up getting though there are a lot of sites and torrents on the internet that have free ebooks, and if you get a format converter like ecalibre you can download whatever format you want and convert it to the type your reader uses. The conversions aren't always perfect though. Pretty much any book over a certain age (30 years maybe?) becomes free public domain, and there are a lot of sites that are constantly adding ebooks, so you can buy an ereader and never pay for a book again if you wanted.