[catsittingstill]

On the (perhaps unwarranted) assumption Harry's question about "why a Kindle?" was generally directed, I'd like to answer too.

I wanted an e-reader because I wanted books that weighed nothing and took no space because I already own, at a conservative estimate, 2,000 lbs of books, and have trouble taking enough books with me when I travel.

I wanted an e-Ink device for the long battery life; I'd already tried out reading on the Palm TX, and had discovered a tendency for it to run out of juice just as I was getting to the good part. I stayed up till 3 in the morning finishing _Pride and Prejudice_ in my bathrobe, crouched shivering over the TX because it had just flat out refused to go any further without a recharge, and the cable wouldn't reach from the plug-in to my nice warm bed.

I wanted the Kindle because I didn't need a PC to access the store. I use a Mac and I'm tired of being treated like a second class citizen about it, and while I knew a Kindle wasn't perfect in that regard, I cared a lot more about the books than about Audible.com, and with the Kindle I didn't need a PC to get books. (Yes, there are Baen and Manybooks and Fictionwise books--and the Kindle and other e-Ink devices get them roughly equally well.)

I wanted the Kindle because I wanted to be able to search the content; since a Kindle is the only e-Ink device that allowed text entry (that I knew of), I could only get that with Kindle.

I wanted a Kindle because I wanted to be able to annotate things. I realize an iLiad can do that too, but it costs a lot more, and I didn't think it had text search capability.

At the time I owned no DRM-protected e-books (I now own some Kindle books) so I wasn't constrained by needing something that would play nicely with a particular DRM.

So that's why my result popped up "Kindle" when I finally bought. If one of the other ebook readers had allowed text entry, *and* didn't require a PC, I might have jumped a different way; I *like* the price and selection and convenience of the Amazon Kindle store, but while they somewhat affected my decision, those weren't deal-clinchers for me. [Later edit due to afterthought] And I don't particularly like Kindle DRM; if there was some way to get an e-reader that had Kindle's important (in my view) advantages without the Kindle DRM I would have given it serious consideration. [end later edit]

Of course, now that I have Web access (however constrained) pretty much everywhere I go, I'm going to have a hard time giving that up for my next e-book reader :-)