-Overall, it works pretty well. I got into reading it just like a paperback.
-The 5-way controller, a bit like a joystick, is cumbersome to use. Rather than just using my thumb, I'd end up using a fingernail to make sure I was engaging it.
-It's not as user-friendly and intuitive as I'd like. I had to reference the user's manual several times to do simple things like setting a bookmark.
-The screen is easy to read, even in bright sunlight.
-It doesn't handle some fonts very well. The italics in Brotherhood of the Rope were almost unreadable at times due to parts of the letters missing.
-It doesn't handle pictures very well. The fonts on the picture captions in Brotherhood of the Rope were so small I couldn't read them even after using the one level of zoom available.
-Sometimes the pagination and paragraph breaks were weird. In one case, a capital letter "O" was split between two lines. It looked like open and closed parentheses.
-It's hard to flip a few pages forward or back. Even if you hit the "turn page" control several times in rapid succession, it will only turn two pages at a time.
-The rudimentary 3G web access built into the Kindle is truly rudimentary and really not useable.
-It doesn't use page numbers in the traditional sense. It uses "location" numbers instead. If you totally lose your place, like I did a couple of times, it's hard to get back to where you were.
In spite of these complaints, I did like the machine overall.
If you are considering buying one, take a close look at the competition. Barnes and Noble came out with one just after I left on my trip, and on paper it looks like a better deal. That's mainly because they have true WiFi and 3G internet capability built in.
The Sony Reader is also worth a look. They cut a deal with Google, and all of the books in the public domain that Google has digitized are available free of charge. The only issue I see with the Sony Reader is that it needs to be hooked up to a computer to download books.
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