[lapwing]

Hi ...

The other day i was wandering about the house having a crisis about how on earth i can manage to fit more books in the house when i thought (for me) outside the box and started to consider ebooks ...

Since then i've downloaded calibre and have merrily downloaded loads of free epub books which although free and exciting i'm finding a pain to read on my netbook ... hence the increasing and obsessive desire for a ereader.

Given that most free books seem to be in epub and i live in the UK the most obvious seemed to be a sony ereader but i looked at some in PC World and they didn't 'feel right' for me. I think I would feel more comfortable with a larger screen more like the Kindle DX. This is partly because i read incredibly fast and therefore would feel like i was turning pages frequently but also i read a lot of PDF's which appear to look good on the kindle DX.

However ... and this is coming from someone who until a few days ago knew nothing about ebooks and their formats ... most of the free ebooks are in EPub and Kindle works with Mobi ? I can use Calibre to covert non DRM EPub's to Mobi but in practise how easy is this ? Will i be entering a minefield where I have to know a lot about doing funny things to code to do this or in practise will calibre do it well enough at the click of a button ?

Also will i be able to have access to most of the books on the Amazon site or are there still a lot of Geographical restrictions ? I have a very large and varied taste in books - from classic novels to science fiction and fantasy, non fiction, such as, politics, philosophy and religion and i also read a lot of PDF's for work and study.

I basically want it all - a big screen, immediate access to a big book shop, newspapers daily and the ability to read loads of free classics at my leisure ...

Any advice would be greatly appreciated

Sarah E