I've had my kindle for about the same amt of time (ordered Dec 2007, got it January-ish, (feb? I forget) 2008). It just doesn't work for technical books (why t

I've had my kindle for about the same amt of time (ordered Dec 2007, got it January-ish, (feb? I forget) 2008). It just doesn't work for technical books (why that's probably a good thing -- I'll cover in a minute). No monospace font, but also, you read tech books a lot faster than normal text. Pages fly by when they've got code in them (most code in these books are API/language based, which means you usually just care about identifiers), and that hits one of the big weaknesses of the kindle: Page flip time. When you're reading a novel or other all-human-text book, the page flip time is barely noticeable, as your eyes are moving to the top-left at the same time. However, if you're scanning a book for a specific section or mention of an identifier, it'll kill you with its slowness. However, if you're like me and read a lot of technical books, this isn't such a bad thing. The kindle's a great way to get in on reading nontech books, which adds a good dimension to a geek's life. There are mailing lists where publishers give you a new ebook a month, to get you into new authors/genres of sci-fi. Plenty of 'regular books': novels, biographies, newspapers, etc. It's a wonderful way to richen your life, with amazon's recommendation engine & a good selection of books. My friend has a sony eReader, and his device is a much nicer piece of hardware. But I win in selection, hands-down. He mostly just reads PDFs on his now, usually datasheets or the like. As for cases, the original works decently for me. I also just don't care that much about cases -- anything to protect the hardware sufficiently without getting in my way is fine. If you play with the case a bit (a little physical-world hacking), you can make it stay on the device pretty well.