Hello f00l. I am a proud owner of a Kindle, also living in N TX. If you'd like to meet someplace, I'd be glad to bring it along for you to try out. Or, PM me with your phone number and I'd be glad to chat with you about it. You can also walk into a large Border's store and handle the Sony PRS 505 if you'd like to compare the two. After holding the Sony, I know I could have been happy enough with it (and it is cheaper), but I figure that the less-expensive books at Amazon will offset the higher cost of the Kindle in a very short time.
So -- your reading patterns seem to be a bit like mine. I am a regular shopper at Half-Price Books and Records; but I'm particularly fond of
Recycled Books on the square in Denton. Such a delightful place to shop and a very cooperative and helpful staff. I order from Amazon.co.uk and purchase some books from the Oxfam shop in Winchester whenever I travel to England -- I'm fond of some of the British authors who aren't easily available here in the USA (such as Mavis Cheek and Rebecca Shaw). And, I swap books through BookCrossing and BookObsessed, BookMooch and PaperBackSwap.
So -- I received my Kindle in mid-February. Since then, I've read 19 books on the Kindle and 20 in paper. I've also "read" one book on unabridged CD and am 1/2-way through another. I've only bought a hand-full of Kindle books from Amazon. I bought some from Baen/WebScriptions, from Steve Jordan, and from Fictionwise. But, the majority of books I've read so far were free downloads from here, Feedbooks, Baen and Manybooks.
One reason why I wanted the Kindle was to help me get my TBR stack under control. This is what it looked like on the day I unwrapped my Kindle:
Now the stacks on the floor are even higher!
I also have a large TBR "stack" of electronic books, but they only take up space on a USB "thumb" drive. My hubby is much happier. And a happy hubby is worth the price of the Kindle
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Surely the Kindle format is hackable like every other format in history, for those who want to read on their 22" monitor or whatever....or xfer to another device. Come on, what hasn't been hacked so far? OK, it's prob against the license. But reading on the Kindle is nice enough that you would only want to hack the format if your Kindle was lost, stolen or damaged, or if Amazon stopped making and supporting the device. Or no? Since I don't own one, I am only guessing.
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The Kindle supports non-secure MobiPocket (both .prc and .mobi formats). Non-secure books can be moved to any number of devices, including your PC. (You can download MobiPocket Reader for Windows and read these books on your PC if you like.) The secure format for the Kindle is .AZW -- a version of secure MobiPocket, and only available through Amazon. Amazon makes your secure books available to a second (or third or fourth ...) Kindle if you add one or more to your account. Also, if you replace your Kindle, you deregister the first one, register the replacement, then re-download the books you've already bought and you can then read them on the new Kindle. I suppose there's some risk that Amazon would go out of the Kindle business, but I'm counting on that not happening.