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A few points about Kindle battery life.
The only thing that uses power under normal use is a page turn. The half second or so that it takes to flash the e-ink is the drain time. Then it is effectively dormant. The reason it goes to sleep is to prevent accidental button-pushes.
If you want to make a note or do a search, it will use battery power.
If you have wireless on, either wifi or 3G, it will take power from the battery. Most of the power drain is minimal as it is only stand-by. Purchasing and downloading a book takes more power.
When you load a new book it will take power as it indexes the book. For a large book this can take many minutes. It only needs to do the indexing once.
If you have several books to download and index it can take a significant proportion of the battery charge. If you download a dozen longish books then go fishing for two weeks you might wish you'd had it on the charger as it was indexing.
A Li-Ion battery typically lasts three to five years. You can burn one out sooner on heavy use, such as playing lots of movies on your laptop, but heavy use on the Kindle is not an issue unless you download like crazy for the next two years. They tend to decay on the number of charge cycles, as well as the depth of charge needed each time. Even left out of the device they run down at a few percent of charge per week. In five years when it is charging to 50% or so you will notice it and want to change.
The battery is already changeable for somebody who knows how to split the cases. Already there are websites showing how to dismantle the K3. By the time you have to change your battery you will be out of warranty and probably be in the market for a newer model anyway. A battery replacement won't mean sending it back to Amazon in the US by that time, unless that is what you choose to do.
I can understand that people might be a bit nervous about battery life, replacement etc, when Amazon has no real present in Australia. However, the battery is not an issue unless you get a faulty unit - very unlikely. And in that case, it's a simple warranty return with a bit of Kindle withdrawal to cope with.
Comparing battery life between Sony, Kobo, Kindle etc, is really not an issue when buying a reader. They will all be good quality batteries suitable for their respective machines. Charging a reader is not like filling your car with petrol and watching your money drain away at the pump.
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