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Personally, I was willing to pay the extra money to get search, dictionary lookup and annotation. When I first decided to get the Kindle over the Sony or the Cybook (the main eInk competitors at the time), it was these features as well as the selection and price in the Amazon store that sealed the deal. Cybook has dictionary support. Actually, its dictionary support is considerably better than the Kindle, but it didn't have search. Sony just didn't have the features I wanted. Great price and nice design, though. And it has better PDF and ePub now which is attractive.
At the time, I didn't really think Whispernet was a big deal. Now that I have it, I see more value in it. The key for me is the free sample chapters. Some stores have excerpts on their sites. Sometimes they're a few paragraphs or even a few pages worth. I've yet to see a store that gave you a whole chapter and sometimes more. This has totally changed the way I buy books. Before I moved to ebooks, I would go to the book store and try to find enough things that interested me to hold me over for a few weeks. I would frequently end up with 5 or so books. Some of them I didn't like enough to finish. Some were a passing fancy and I didn't even start. I estimate a good 20% of the stuff on my shelves was unread. Since my taste runs to contemporary fiction, that was a lot of hardbacks. Now, when I hear of a book that interests me, I go to Amazon and click on the button to send myself a sample. When I want to read a new book, I have a bunch of samples waiting for me. When I finish one and decide I like it, I buy the book. Not only is the book cheaper, I'm not buying books I don't finish. Of course, I could read the shorter online excerpt many stores provide and decide from there if want it. They're usually about as long as I would read standing in the book store, too. IME that's not enough for me to be reasonably sure (as exemplified by the many unread books in my library). Also, since I'm pretty much always where there is Whispernet coverage, I don't worry about buying stuff ahead so I'll have something when I'm ready for the next book. I can be at a cafe, in the park, on the train or just snuggled up in bed with a cat on my lap. I don't need to get myself in shopping mode when I want to be in reading mode. So, not only is it astoundingly easy to buy books, I'm actually buying fewer and reading more than I did before. I'm not trying to anticipate what I will want later. I buy what I want now.
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