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i hope this adds a little something --
re. kindle: amazon content can be purchased via whispernet. non-amazon content can be converted to amazon format (.mobi) using mobipocket creator or calibre, and then moved to the kindle via usb cable. i do this a lot myself, and it's no more irritating than moving copies of files to a flash drive. amazon has announced that the price of whispernet file-conversions will be .15 per mb per file, rounded up to the nearest mb, starting monday. so it's sounding to many of us as if they are going to start charging for that. it won't break me in an emergency (like if i *have* to get an article onto my kindle from work -- i don't carry the cable); but i'll mainly transfer manually, since i've been doing that so much anyway. once i'm moving a bunch of documents at once (like a dozen non-drm pulp titles from manybooks.net or feedbooks.com), it actually gets easier to move them in a clump via usb than to e-mail them. (now that i think about it, i'm not sure that including more than one document attached to a single e-mail works. maybe someone else has done that successfully. "anyone..? anyone..?")
the kindle has a couple of advantages that i think you *might* find useful. one is that it will store 1500 titles. it has nearly 2 gb of storage. the other is that it includes cross-title searchability. meaning that even though you won't need or want the dictionary, you might wish to find which book a particular passage came from. the entire kindle is for all practical purposes completely keyword searchable. i've only got 360+ books loaded, and am still happy to have that feature.
i'm tempted to eventually *also* have a sony or some other, more open device, for native pdf compatibility, and to be able to get e-books from the library. (don't look at me like that. i have more than one bookcase, don't i?) and i have no plans to be brand-loyal to amazon. but i reeeeally like the ability to download samples of text for free. once formatting quality is more reliable, i can see that feature going away; but in my life it helps me remember what i want to buy (i save my wish list for print, and objects); and it allows me to make sure a book is decently formatted before i ever pay for it. i like that i don't have to mess around with getting credited for purchases of badly-formatted material.
but on the kindle, quite a few people dislike that the 'page' color is light gray. if one refreshes the screen, the text becomes darker, and i find that the longer i read, the more consistently dark the text appears to be; but it's clear that there is some variation among devices.
my 2 cents.
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