I got a Sony 505 first but after I'd bought about six ebooks from UK ebook shops, they stopped selling to anyone not in the UK.
So there I was, with my lovely new reader and not a single book to buy for it - at the time, no other epub shop (outside Baen, I guess, but I wasn't and still am not interested in their books) would sell anything to me. I wasn't that keen on only pirating books (although for a while it was pretty much the only option there was, outside reading fanfic on my shiny new Sony).
Amazon was just in the process of opening up their ebook sales globally though, and the Kindle 3 had just come out, they were willing to sell it to me.
So a Kindle 3 it was. It wasn't long after that first Books On Board and later Kobo become available to me, and by then I'd discovered how to cleanse books from DRM, and how to use Calibre, so formats are of no concern to me any more.
I'm not tied to the Kindle - although I have a 1st generation Paperwhite now as I was tempted by the frontlight and there were no other reasonable options at the time - but as long as they make readers of comparable or better quality and features than everyone else (that is available to me), I can't see why I should not stay with a Kindle. I buy maybe half my books on Amazon these days - well, more again now that BooksOnBoard is no more - and keep everything I buy cleaned from DRM and backed up, and conversion, if needed, would take only moments.
And Kindle offers something to me that I don't think others do - the Send to Kindle PC application which means I don't need to fumble around with the cable daily or weekly to sideload books, and I can choose to keep them on the Amazon cloud. It's a small convenience, and using a cable to sideload wouldn't exactly kill me (I've done so before after all), but it's a convenience I like and I'm glad Amazon lets me send, wirelessly, hundreds of books bought elsewhere to my Kindle and keep them on the Amazon cloud without any issues.
