[ndixon]

You can hunt for free-for-a-day and discounted Kindle books - I do this - but if that's your only source of books, you're not going to get the most out of your e-reader.
If you really love reading classics, then I'd say you can justify having a Kindle for these, but they don't have to come from the Kindle Store.

I'd already built up a collection of out-of-copyright works in epub format from Project Gutenberg and feedbooks before I got a Kindle (I used to have a Sony 505), and it's really easy to convert them with Calibre.

If I add it up, there are probably enough classics on Gutenberg for me to justify the Kindle purchase several times over. It helps that I enjoy reading the classics, and there's quite a backlog that I'd like to get through, but I've already bought some of them as Penguin paperbacks in the past at something like £7.99 each.

I could go through a catalog and pick out at least 30 classics I'd have in a heartbeat, but that would come to around £250 at print prices.

The other thing that makes the Kindle worthwhile is the customer service from Amazon, and pretty much no-quibble replacement policy. I'm hoping I'll never have to use this, but Amazon seems to be better than most.