Just saw this thread.

Have to give a strong vote for a Kindle 2. I bought one for a 3 week vacation last month. My wife and 6 yr daughter are avid readers. My wife can read about 2 to 3 paperbacks on a 5 hour flight. My daughter reads chapter books at the rate of about 3 per day. On a typical week, we go to the library about 3x, and she gets about 10 to 15 books at a time.

I was hesitant because I didn't like the idea of having to buy books. I can't beat my wife's argument that the library is free. But the convenience of the Kindle 2 is hard to beat for plain volume of books. I bought a bunch of books for my kid (some under $5) and a bunch of best sellers for the wife. I found out a way to mod Mobi ebooks downloaded from my local library so they could be read on the Kindle (google kindle fix). The book still 'expires' after 2 weeks but it works. The Kindle can also view pix so I was able to get some graphic novels that would display well on the Kindle, B&W works best. The Bone novel was great.

The Kindle navigation was great and it's very readable in daylight. Battery life can last up to a few days w/ several hours of daily use. In Asia, I was able to access Amazon.com and download my daily SF Chronicle, allowing me to read my daily paper. It's true, this isn't a great newspaper device, I don't think one exists, even with the Kindle DX. But I strongly believe that printed newspapers will die soon, mostly because of costs, so I've found this to be a great option, much better than reading a website. It only costs about $6/mo and is a much 'greener' alternative.

I also have an iPhone which is a FABULOUS companion with the Kindle. I was able to sync almost all of my purchased books on the iPhone, allowing me to have a 'Kindle' for both my daughter and wife at the same time. It's also cool that the iPhone app syncs to Kindle.

I've heard good things about the Sony Reader but it's hard to beat the convenience of the Kindle and iPhone.

You can read PDFs on the Kindle. You can pay the fee and have Amazon convert each file, or you can google and find free tools to convert PDFs. But it doesn't work well w/ PDFs that have pictures.

It works well w/ .TXT files, I've put a few on my Kindle w/ no issues. I've even made a TXT file, with text telling my kids to go to sleep. Then I use the text to speech and play it back to the kids. Funny.

On the 2GB Kindle 2, I was able to put on 220 books, text files and graphic novels. And I still had about 1.1GB of space. There's a lot of space...

Last edited by oldskoolboarder; 05/28/09 04:49 AM.