I keep my PRS-505 in my purse, in the cover it came with, which is missing one of its end tabs. At night, it goes on the headboard over the bed. Or sometimes in the printer tray next to the computer, if I've been uploading books onto it. I carry it everywhere. I try to treat it gently, but I don't wrap it in bubble wrap & handle it with gloves--if it can't take everday use, I need to find that out.
There are thousands of free ebooks available here, and at manybooks.net and feedbooks.com, and DRM-free ebooks available at Baen.com and smashwords.com. They aren't the currently top-of-the-charts books, but there's a great deal of wonderful literature (for any definition of "wonderful" that doesn't require a current NYT Book List rating) available for the Reader. It does take some work to find them, though; that's part for the
Reading Recommendations forum.
(Which leads to a thought--it'd be great if some enterprising coder figured out how to arrange a recomendations list of "if you like [this] popular author, you might like [these] public domain/creative commons works.")