Update
Good timing. I read that Amazon is going to add lending as well. That helps. Expect Kindle based reading clubs everywhere.
I have been waiting for an affordable e-reader for a while. When Nook and Kindle dropped their prices, I knew the time had come.
Most of my reading are non-fiction, photography related or technical books. Almost all my technical books are now published by Pragmatic Programmer and given the rate at which Ruby, Rails et al change, the only sensible thing to do is to buy their e-books. The cool thing about their e-books is they iterate quickly and continuously update their books, so you buy ONE e-book for Rails 2 and another for Rails 3 and get the free upgrades.
I dislike reading for a long time on the backlit LCD screens and I try to read at least an hour a day. Given this, I was printing quite a bit of my technical books and carrying the printed paperwork with me when I went outside.
Given that background, e-ink sounded like the best bet.
I have used the Kindle 3 for about a month now, read five different books on it so far. Here is a subjective take on the Kindle.
Yes, it does disappear
It weighs next to nothing. It is small enough to be lugged around everywhere. The keyboard looks odd at first, but once you start reading, it disappears as well. All that remains is the beautiful reading experience the e-ink produces. After a month of reading e-ink, I find it a bit odd to read printed ink 
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At first, the blacking out during page refreshes was jarring, but now my mind has learned to tune it out. Kindle3 is pretty fast as well. The page rendering is almost instant and it is pretty contrasty with the default settings as well. I haven’t found a reason to push up the contrast. I had to push up the fonts a tad size bigger to make it easy to read (Damn, I am getting old).
I have used the Kindle in all kinds of lighting, incandescent, fluorescent, direct sunlight and even candle light (!). It seems to work just right pretty much everywhere. When I am next to a huge light source, I do see a bit of glare at a specific angle which is fixed instantly with a slight adjustment of angle.
The longest I have read in one sitting so far is about 2.5 hours during which time I was pacing as I read, lying down reading it with one hand raised and of course, sitting. After about a month, I can say that the Kindle provides the best reading experience I have had.
I think the Kindle is lighter than even most paperbacks so that does help. Try reading the 800 page Pick Axe ruby guide in your bed with single hand 
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And lastly, my eyes don’t feel tired at the end of a long reading session that I look for artificial tears which I use after 14 hour days staring at backlit monitors.
Going back and forth
I wasn’t sure how going back and forth on the Kindle would be – particularly for technical books that are used for reference. Between a combination of bookmarking, table of contents and index, I can make it work, but it isn’t as efficient as opening a printed book and thumbing through the index.
I typically bookmark the index first and then start there. Often I jump a few pages past using the “Go To …” feature in the index. Surprisingly, search works very well and the results are navigable quite easily.
I haven’t found it frustrating yet to use this for reference material, but it is definitely not optimal. Thankfully, a lot of my reference reading is done during coding, so PDF search offers me a solution in such cases.
Hooked onto reading
Before I knew, I was buying books. It started with Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, then picked up Daniel Suarez’s Daemon, which was quickly followed by Freedom. I am amused that I am reading fiction again, but I guess I could say that the Kindle makes me read more :~), which is a sentiment I hear from other Kindle owners.
I have expanded my Kindle use past books. Quite a few blogs I read such as Mish aren’t really for quick grasping. Some of these blogs are really involved that make you read and re-read. They are essentially what Kindle calls as singles (I guess), so I started pushing those to the Kindle as well.
I use Calibre, an excellent e-book management software to manage the RSS feeds I need pushed to Kindle. It runs a cron job and pushes the updated feeds to my Kindle through the free emailing route. Works fantastically.
I also use Calibre to convert PDFs to the .mobi format and add them to the Kindle. Amazon also does a free PDF to mobi conversion through email which works very well.
Tamil PDFs work just fine in the Kindle. I have Sujatha’s short stories as well as Ponniyin Selvan in PDF. The PDF to mobi conversion doesn’t work since the tamil fonts are not supported in the Kindle. The downside of PDF is the font size changes don’t work for PDFs. I work around this by changing the orientation of the Kindle and leave it at auto font size which seems about right for Tamil PDFs.
I have also saved random web pages that I like to read to the Kindle. I use a convoluted way to do this. I save the pages using Instapaper, and when I want, hit Instapaper and convert the pages to mobi format and then use Calibre to transfer them to kindle. I have read a few huge articles this way. I can totally see me coding a simple web app very soon that does this on the fly. A bookmarklet that on click, converts the given page to mobi and emails it to my kindle. Should be easily doable.
The negatives
I consider the lack of ePub support a huge negative for the Kindle. My local library has a few good DRM protected ePubs that they rent out. Adding DRM protected ePub support as the Nook or Sony eReader does would be the last missing link. I was very tempted by the Nook for a very brief while given that it runs Android. I found the Nook to be heavier, bigger, slower and less contrasty. I reluctantly gave up on ePub support for the lighter, faster Kindle.
I don’t get the browser included in the Kindle. It is useless. Modern web pages are no fun to navigate through buttons and if you can’t do touch, you might as well leave out the browser. The social networking connections seem like something a marketing executive had to check off on their lists.
Color e-ink would be nice, now that color nooks are being rumored, I hope by the time I am ready to upgrade my Kindle, there would be a sub $100 color Kindle that supports DRM protected ePub format .
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