I just researched 35 books, checking out Amazon, ebooksmall, BooksonBoard, Dieselbooks & Mobipocket (totally forgot about Fictionwise). Some are new, some are not, some are popular, some are not - you get the drift. I've attached a pdf if anyone wants to take a peek.
Out of 35:
- 13 were not available as paperback
- 3 were Kindle only
- 2 were Kindle & PDF, but not Mobipocket
Average book prices:
- Kindle 9.85
- Mobipocket 12.67
- PDF 13.33
My conclusions:
- Kindle's availability advantage is not huge
- Kindle's price advantage is there, but it's also not that big
- Getting a reader than can handle Mobi & PDF seems like the wisest idea
- Some publishers are offering good prices on ebooks, and that is more likely to grow than shrink
I think I just talked myself out of a Kindle :-P Living out of the US, there's no difference in ease of use with other ereaders. I'm thinking I should figure out what can display pdfs well and take it from there.
As far as features like annotation, search, etc - search would be nice, but not necessary. Annotations would be nice, but I'd rather do it by hand. Same with dictionary lookup.