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Hi stormcloude, and welcome!
Different people will recommend different devices; we all know the strengths and weaknesses of our particular readers best, plus some of us (not me, of course) have strong feelings about certain companies or formats. So you'll hear a lot of different answers, though here on the Kindle section of Mobileread, you can probably expect to hear a lot of people recommend the Kindle.
Like me, for instance.
Okay, general e-book reader pluses: you can carry a lot of books with you, and e-books (the files) take no space and weigh nothing. You can find e-books on the web, download them to your computer, and transfer them to your reader quickly, allowing instant gratification for those of us who live an hour's drive from the nearest bookstore :-)
What I like about the Kindle in particular: it has a cell phone chip in it, that lets it dial Amazon (and also the Internet) so you don't need to mess around with connecting it to a computer (unless you don't have good EVDO cell phone coverage where you live--Um, you do live in the US, right? For now Kindle's cell phone chip only works in the US). You can buy books from Amazon with a few scrolls and clicks, or there are simple documents you can download from FictionWise or MobileRead that let you download (free) e-books of out-of-copyright books over the cell phone chip also. You can look up words you don't know in the included dictionary, search your books for a word or phrase, or expand that search out to wikipedia and Google. You can highlight parts of the book you think are important, and write notes in the margins using the funny-looking keyboard (you type with your thumbs; it works better than you might think). You get a "my notes and marks" file for each book that lets you see *just* the highlighted bits and the notes for a "cliff notes" type review.
You get access to the web under the "experimental" menu from the home page. The basic browser is, um, plain looking, and kind of slow, and with 4 shades of grey, you really are reading the web for the articles, but you *can* read the web for the articles, wherever you happen to be (as long as you have EVDO coverage). You can even use gmail and stuff like that.
I guess those are the things that sold it to me.
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