Books shouldn't be a problem; Nooks will read any ePub except for Apple's, so Amazon and Apple are the only two bookstores with incompatible formats. There are a bunch of independent bookstores, such as BooksOnBoard.
www.inkmesh.com is a good website for finding books and shopping for prices.
I'd recommend looking for your free books here. Some of the folks here take Project Gutenberg books and format them, restore figures and drawings, correct OCR artifacts, etc. By the time they post them on the e-books section of the website, they look a lot better than the ones at PG.
Have you looked at the Sonys? They have a polished user interface and page-turn buttons. I mostly turn the page with the touch screen, but it is really nice to have buttons. I would definitely miss them if I had a reader that was only a touch screen.