Yep, I got one less than a month ago for my birthday (from my in-laws; if my husband had spent that much money I'd have yelled at him) and I'm really liking it. I've bought a few books on Amazon, for half-off the hardback cover price (my favorite author had a new release, but I ain't paying for a hard cover), and within a few minutes I was settling down to read it. No driving to a store, no waiting for shipments to arrive... that part's cool. You can resize the text easily and there are buttons on both sides to advance a page.
I'm also using it for fanfic, like Carol said. If you have the file as either a .txt or .doc file, all you have to do is email it to an address (yournamehere@kindle.com) they set up for you. I email the file, wait a few minutes, then bam, there it is on my Kindle. (They charge a grand total of 10 cents for this service) It has saved my sanity, these last two weeks, because they've given me something excruciatingly boring to do, but my Kindle reads the story to me <g> Yesterday I listened to Four Days to Nightfall, and right now I'm about halfway through Teamwork (the sequel).
Like Carol said, it pronounces things weird. It does a pretty good job, really, but it's nothing like a real audiobook. Words it doesn't recognize get pronounced with a short vowel sound (it keeps talking about Lex Luffer). "Dr. Klein" was occasionally referred to as "Drive Klein" In the sci-fi stories I uploaded, there are "spass-e-ports" and "eckars" (for spaceports and aircars) but once you get used to it, it's not hard to understand. Just like listening to someone with a foreign accent.
The thing that really annoyed me was the way it handled emphasized words -- you know how we use *stars* around a word to indicate emphasis. Well, Kindle reads that as "asterisk-s-t-a-r-s-asterisk" which just sounds weird.
But I've starting taking all those out of the files I want to upload, so it's not a problem on my newer uploads.
My husband's got a Sony reader, and that seems to suit him just fine but he's got more techie weirdness to deal with, especially when uploading files.
I haven't figured out everything yet -- you can subscribe to magazines or newspapers, I think, and maybe even certain blogs. You can web-surf to some limited extent, apparently, but I haven't tried that yet. It's fairly easy to navigate through the Kindle store to get more books, but I find it easier to go to Amazon.com on my real computer, and shop for Kindle versions from there. Some of them are way cheap -- we got a short story collection from H. Beam Piper for 80 cents. So if you like old, obscure authors, you could score big.
PJ
