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I bought Kindle WiFi because it was cheap and had the best Perl e-ink screen. After several months of use I find it quite inconvenient to deal with conversion of other file formats to mobi format every day.
Initially I thought that it will not be such a big issue because it is a WiFi device but I buy only 1/3 of my books from Amazon (1/3 are epubs both DRM and non-DRM, and 1/3 are my personal documents).
Greatest inconveniences with e-mailing via Amazon servers are as follows:
1) e-mail conversion sometimes fails for unknown reasons
2) there is an annoying delay of more than 1-2 minutes (it depends on file size)
3) conversion is not perfect, sometimes you get margins that are close to 50% of the screen size, sometimes encoding is garbled, or all the text becomes italic or bold
4) You need to be online for this function to work (3G is not an answer as personal document transfer costs are too high for me)
Using calibre conversion has the same faults – it also takes time, you need a special WinSCP software to transfer the files directly to Kindle, usually you see the problem only after transfer etc. And I won't even mention PDF reading issues.
When using USB cable for transfer, it is also annoying that after disconnecting from the computer it takes some time to rebuild the database.
Before Kindle I used Palm device for reading mobipocket books and although I also used to transfer books and new documents mostly via USB cable, it seemed to work quicker and more reliably in conjunction with Mobipocket PC. Apart from superb screen, Kindle software is still quite immature.
In short: Kindle works very well with Amazon books but it is a hassle to use with outside sources. My next device will not be Kindle anymore.
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