I got one of these from the family for my birthday. It's pretty cool. You can download hundreds of classics for free.

Can a Kindle recognize .pdf files or anything like that... like if you wanted to download manga to it... would it recognize the 'image formats'

Or does it have it's own file extension.

It says it recognizes pdf. Haven't tried it yet.
But not other formats. It says they'll transfer txt documents for a fee. I'm not a super technogeek so I'll probably only use 10% of it's abilities. I actually only use my Ipod for music.

I'd love to have a kindle, even though I know I'd prefer regular books over it, but they're very expensive & I don't know if I'll ever be able to afford one.

Yeah I wasn't completely sold on the idea at first and I still don't know how much money I'll spend on it but for example they have the complete works of H. P. Lovecraft for a couple of bucks.
I do know I'm backing up any book files on my computer especially if I pay for them.

It's not the price of the books I'm worried about, those can be found very cheap, or even free online, but the kindle itself is very expensive. I used to have a lot of books on my computer & I only paid for one & that was only 99 cents for the entire Twilight series on ebay lol.

I put on a PDF I had of Dune. It worked fine but I can't find any way to zoom so the text is way too small. That would probably be a problem with manga too. Can you find a lot of it in PDF?

I read ebooks on my iPod Touch sometimes. It's pretty okay but after a while it gets hard to read. I wouldn't buy a Kindle, though, because I much prefer physical books and most kindle books are only a few bucks cheaper than the real thing. And also the Kindle itself is outrageously overpriced.

And for small text on pdfs, you can convert it to HTML, copy and paste it into a word processor, make the font bigger, and then re-convert it into a pdf and I find it works pretty well. At least with the iPod...And then only if the pdf isn't screwy with the formatting when you convert it into HTML...

I wouldn't buy a Kindle. I like having the book in my hands and turning the pages physically. I hate reading stuff on a screen. I just don't focus as well.

^The same for me. Longer texts are bothersome to read on screens for me.

I really want an e-book reader. I wouldn't have to hunt down books anymore. It'd be so convenient.

E-books aren't tough to find on IRC. Lots of groups convert their own E-books specifically for IRC channels, so there's a lot to be found on IRC that can't be found elsewhere. After IRC, I'd say that Emule is your best bet for E-books. After that, trusty ol' torrents.

I have lots of e-books. I just can't find physical copies.

Oh. By "Hunt down books" I thought you meant E-books.

After I read an e-book I really like I look for it at a book store. They never have my favourites though.

^with danger of sounding like an add, I have very good experience with amazon, and mostly good experience with its marketplace.

To get back on topic: I think I'd like a Kindle, but I heard that Sony make great E-book readers which are sometimes on par, if not a tad better, than Kindles. I'd likely be content with any E-book reader though, and heard Kindles are great, but I wanted to make some of you acknowledge the fact that there are good alternatives to the Kindle. The Kindle just happens to be the most popular E-book reader out right now.

I want to see what e-ink is like in real life. I hear that the page-turning rate for e-ink is a lot slower, which would irritate me to no end as I tend to compulsively flip pages.

I'm also really concerned about PDF readability. This is the only place where I think the iPad is superior as an ebook reader, because my iPod Touch can handle PDFs fairly well, except that the font has to be tiny in order to fit on the screen. My main use for an ebook reader is to read books I've downloaded in Spanish, since the cost of importing books is astronomical. Nearly all of them are in PDF form. As far as I know, most ebook readers tend to suck at this.

Sometimes I want an ereader, sometimes I don't. Besides reading Spanish books, my main motivation is not having to pay for books. But I can only get an ebook reader when I have a job, which means that I'll have money to buy regular books, and I can buy an awful lot of paperbacks for the cost of a ebook reader.

I got my Kindle today. It's fantastic. Looks like cardboard or magazine pages, not exactly paperback paper. Very fast page turning, the black flashing is barely noticible. I have mostly .mobi files, one .txt which is fine except for weird paragraph spacing which is vaguely annoying, one book which I bought, and two .pdfs. I'm not really impressed with the handling of pdfs. The text is far too small to view them vertically, and horizontally it's better but it's still fairly small. It's impossible to read them zoomed in because it's just too annoying having to refresh constantly to get to the other half of the page. Still, I figured it would be like that. And I haven't played around with trying to re-configure the pdf's to fit a 6" screen.

Overall I'm very, very pleased. The case is also sweet. I got the one with the light, in green. The green is a little darker than the picture, but it's still nice.