My girlfriend and I occasionally share books (usually she borrows mine), but my understanding is that the books you "buy" are licensed only to a single device, and you can only share a book one time, and even then only if the publisher allows it.
I could be misunderstanding things, but it seems like if she wanted to borrow one of my books, she would probably need to borrow my Kindle to do it, and essentially borrow all of my books to read one.
Until things get sorted out, I think I'll pass on the eReaders.
You don't have to deprive yourself of e-readers. I am completely happy with O'Reilly's and Pragmatic's policy (no DRM, multi-format). I am a little less happy with Manning, who makes it clear my book is only available for download for the 5 days following purchase. All of them offer DRM-free PDF as a minimum. I am so far very happy with my Nook (B&W e-paper version).
And there is also Feddbooks, which is conveniently linked from Stanza (I have it on my iPod)
Oh. And after the 1984 episode, it would be hard to convince me to buy a Kindle.
I don't really need an eReader for programming books. Most of the time I'm better off reading those at the computer where I can play with the code in them. For that, I can just buy the PDF and read it in Foxit.
I'd want an eReader more for fiction, and fiction definitely still prefers DRM over non-DRM.
I think a good market for this is in areas with long, public transportation commutes. Those who take the car to work have fewer good use cases for e-readers.
So far, I find the Pragmatic and O'Reilly ebooks to be pretty nice on Kindle. Code examples don't always look super. But I sometimes landscape the view (especially on pdfs) and it's much better.
But I also tend to read and hack separately anymore these days - reading to drink the bigger picture, then hack and use Google as my language reference . . .
You expect them to provide you with the ability to download the book any time you want, but you don't want them to ask you to pay a license fee. Sounds like you'd like the benefits of a license (someone else handles storing the media) without the tradeoff (someone else has control of the media). Doesn't seem fair to the publisher.
It does depend on your reading interests, but one big difference between books and audiovisual content is that there is an enormous selection of books that are out of copyright. If you like to read those, you can obtain them for free and without DRM from sites like Project Gutenberg.
> Until things get sorted out, I think I'll pass on the eReaders.
It's never going to get "sorted out". From the perspective of the retailers, this is a good thing. It allows them to make more money. Why would they ever change their policies?
My Kindle is still content to read all of the titles I've stripped, although usually I stick to the DRM'd versions on-device to allow Whispersync between that and my iPhone.
I would not do it, since I don't want to financially help anyone who sells DRM. I would like to see a DRM-free world. That's not going to happen if I pay for it.
Amazon allows you to read a book on up to six Kindles (or Kindle compatible devices such as iPhones / iPads).
It can be a bit fiddly (the easiest thing would be for you and your girlfriend to share a single account) but it's doable.
Amazon should feel free to yank whatever it wants off its bookshelves (and, in fact, should probably be a bit more discerning given some of the recent crap they've been selling) - but, I don't know if they should be sending their customers _already purchased_ books into the memory hole.