Hugh has a great post on books versus ebooks. Well worth the read. It also includes a list of places you can get free ebooks. A teaser:
Reading an ebooks is just “another way” to be reading, it’s not necessarily a replacement of a hard copy of a book. After all, I prefer to talk to people face-to-face, but I recognize the utility of the telephone. One does not replace the other. In fact, they are complimentary. I’d suggest the same could be said of ebooks and books.
And, if I haven’t convinced you about ebooks, consider this: you could spread the entire corpus of written human knowledge (pre-1923) everywhere in the world, essentially for free, using ubiquitous ebook readers already in the hands of just about every teacher in even the poorest countries in the world: that is, the mobile phone.
While you’re at it, check out the Book Oven Blog, a great place for lovers of books, making books, and our relationship with text.
I’ve been drooling over Amazon’s Kindle for months, but the inability to highlight passages and make notes is a non-starter for me. Plus, I like the pretentious look of a stuffed library.
I was one of the first to buy the original Kindle, and quite frankly found it to be a big nuisance. It would frequently hang requiring resetting, and the page control buttons were too long and always in the way. Consequently, I didn’t use it much.
Kindle 2 so far, as a reader, has been flawless. The battery lasts for about 3 days of heavy use; the built in dictionary works; it remembers where I am in every document; Amazon converted my purchase history to the new device automatically; The new case attaches in a much more robust way; I like it and use it.