I've heard the complaints about the Kindle. Most of them sound pretty familiar by this point.  Namely, it won't replace a good book. The selection of 300,000 books is too limited.  According to one writer who has NEVER tried the Kindle: The e-reading experience will never beat, or for that matter match, the traditional reading experience. (The irony is, of course, that this is a Purdue student, writing for the Purdue student newspaper, online......)

I'm sorry to be so cheesy, but please don't knock the Kindle before you've tried it. If you are a reader and have the budget for the now $300 Kindle, I'd say, "Buy it!"

I have had my Kindle for about a month and I fricking love it. First of all, as one commenter put it, the Kindle is a reading enabler. It is so easy to load up the Kindle with content it's not even funny. Want a book? Press a button......Want 50 books? Press the button a few more times and you have a few more......For me, another value of the Kindle is its portability; I can take twenty books with me to the beach instead of my usual two or three and can instantly quote from the books (which is something my friends do not yet enjoy). For those who read several books at once, the Kindle provides the easiest flip-through method I've seen. The Kindle 2 also looks much nicer than the first Kindle with its Apple-like design and it is lightweight and easy to read. Amazon seems to have solved its page-turning problems of the first Kindle as well.

My favorite features so far on the Kindle are the text-size changer and the ability to use the dictionary by moving the cursor (which is somewhat awkward) over a word. If Amazon wanted to step it up a notch, they could also include the Urban Dictionary, but that might make the Kindle 3 if I'm lucky. The controversial text-to-speech feature is not something I really enjoy, but do like now and again.

There are some drawbacks to the Kindle.....nightstand pictures of scattered books will never be the same and while 300,000 titles sounds like a lot it's frustrating when you can't find the title you want. For example, when I looked for books written by Luke Rhineheart, who wrote "The  Diceman", nothing was  available for the Kindle. The biggest drawback for me, and this is a big negative, is that from what I can see, there is no way to download books for the Kindle from overseas, including Canada and Mexico, which is a bummer for those preferring international travel.  I am hoping that this will one day be ironed out. Lastly, I don't recommend reading any graphic novels on the Kindle. While this is a horrible thought for most comic book afficianadoes, I can definitely say, "Do not try that at home."