I've had mine for two years and haven't regretted it a bit. The idea of having a live Internet feed doesn't interest me, though. I use my Reader to read books, not to be distracted by the Internet. The Sony eBook Store needs a revamp, but it has all of the titles I've looked for. I do request books as they come out so that when I'm ready for them, they'll be there at the paperback rates.

I find my reader to be a very convenient alternative to books. The technology they use is not backlit and there is no flicker. It means that I still need a book light at night but I never have to turn the page so the book light is actually convenient for once. When I was going to the gym 5 or 6 times a week, the Reader was my constant companion. Being able to change the font size made it possible to read from a larger distance while on the elliptical machine and the built-in MP3 player made it an all-in-one solution for me. I wouldn't try to take a book with me since I leave anything I touch while on the machine drowning in sweat.

I'm reading a book from the library at home right now. I can't use a book light on it because it would keep getting uncentered as I changed positions in bed or turned pages, so I have to keep a light on, which disturbs my wife. I worry that the page turns might wake up my wife, a light sleeper. I don't think I'd have even noticed if I hadn't had the Reader for so long.

As far as DRM goes, the books you can buy on the Sony site can be used on five devices. The devices can be Readers or computers and they can be changed. For instance, we have two Readers, so that's two devices and we each have a computer at home making four "permanent devices". When we travel, we can assign a laptop or someone else's computer to the fifth slot in case we need to get more books or should we need to restore books from the Internet. Once you buy the books, they're yours. They keep an archive of the books you've bought so that you can re-download them as you need to. But the software on the computer also keeps the files on the computer and you can transfer them to specific places on your computer or to removable media as well as the Reader itself.

At least for the Reader, the books aren't really all that much less. I think they discount something like 20% off of the cost of the lowest priced available edition. But if you have a membership at B&N or use a normal coupon from Borders, that's standard pricing for the books anyway. I usually wait for the books to drop from the mid-$20s at the hardcover release into the $7 range when the Mass Market Paperback comes out a few months later. I'm sure it has a lot more to do with the publishers wanting their full cut as much as Sony's greed. Sony makes a lot of classics available for around a dollar. I finally waded through Anna Karenina because it was so cheap.

My wife wanted one when they first came out and I had a 25% off shopping spree day from Borders, so I used it and then the next month, after learning more about it and knowing she wouldn't let me borrow her's, I used the credit I earned from buying hers to get one for me. Neither of them cost me more than $250 because of their old frequent buyers club, but they changed the system and lost a lot of my business. They probably lost a lot of my business since I started buying book online from Sony anyway.

If you're just reading at home, the Reader might not be for you. I think the target audience is completely different for the Kindle, though. It seems more like a Panera/Starbucks "be seen with me" device.

In a way you can pass on the books forever as long as the other devices are on your account of if you give your account to someone along with the reader or if you put the books on a reader that you loan to someone. I think that the way it works is like this:

Each Sony eBook account has a code that is used in the license verification. When you register the device, it gets that part of the code and can unlock eBooks that are encoded for the account. The web site won't let you add more than 5 devices to your account but it will let you remove a device and add another one. In theory, any device that was formerly on the account will still have the unlock code but won't be able to work with the Sony Connect software. Since the Reader has an SD slot, you could just move the books onto an SD card and onto a Reader. But that Reader wouldn't be able to download new books any other way until it was added back onto an account.

Basically, if you want to share books with non-immediate family members, the paper editions are the way to go. We frequently buy books in both media (paper only when on substantial sale) so that we can pass them along. We usually wait for the price of any book for the Readers to drop to below $10 before we dive into it. Some of the ones we bought waited for months before we actually got around to reading them.