Definitely. Like the grandparent commenter, I don't use any technology that frustrates or annoys me, which means that I don't use a whole lot of technology. The Kindle, however, has been great and fairly frustration-free - definitely a net positive.

Related aside: The world seems to be making it more and more difficult not to have a smart phone (or, almost equivalently, to have a dumb phone). This sucks.

Has the Kindle become the new Kleenex and Google? Are the alternatives so insignificant that they aren't worth mentioning? I'm not talking about the Nook, I'm talking about a $50 Alturek e-reader that you can read text files and PDFs on. I think it's fantastic (but small).

Depends on what you're after. The Kindle is backed up by Amazon's huge catalogue of books, and has a ridiculously easy purchasing mechanism (sometimes too easy...), along with almost fault-free syncing to the iPhone/iPad apps for those 10 spare minutes when I'm waiting for a bus and wanting something to read.

Don't know about the US, but certainly in the UK there's nothing that I've come across that comes even close to the Kindle for my usage patterns - and I'm prepared to pay that little bit extra for that level of usability.

.txt and .pdf are the absolute wrong formats for e-books. .pdf formatting is usually broken for eReaders, and .txt has no formatting whatsoever. Also, you'll really only ever get those formats if you're pirating, which usually entails transcription errors.

I used to pirate all my books, but it got to the point where I realized paying $6 for the pleasure of a properly-formatted, error-free book was a better deal than pirating and ripping them.

Only problem with my Kindle is I forget the title of books I read. I don't see the title when I "close" the book (read: turn my kindle off).

"Hey I read this great book the other day!" "Oh really? That sounds really cool!" "Yeah, here you can borrow it..... Oh wait never mind..." " :( "

I don't think it really beats paper materials in logistics. You're buying proprietary books. 14-day lending to other people (who may not have a Kindle) doesn't really solve that.

For what it's worth, there is a Kindle reader app that lets you read books w/o an actual Kindle. But I agree that lending restrictions (and the question of who really owns the copy of the book) do make things more difficult.

It doesn't beat paper materials in all forms of logistics, but it is superior in most of the ways I usually care about.

But then keep bringing your 1000+ pages book and a few magazines with you to the bus, to read en-route...