I own a kindle and I like it a lot. I also have an ipad but reading books on the kindle is much easier on the eyes.

The kindle is quite slow with big pdf's or graphic intensive ones (I downloaded Deathwatch the rpg as a pdf and the kindle struggles with that). Getting pdf's to it is easy either by docking it to a pc or emailing them to the device (just don't do this over 3G as you are charged per Mb for that).

Can't comment on the Nook, never seen one.

I'm a kindle fan, Amazon integration rocks . I use it to catch up on news and read documents on the tube. I read fiction with it when i'm home.

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The Kindle is awesome for reading books, and functional for PDFs. By using landscape and fit to width most PDFs are readable, but some (like the Epic core rules, unfortunatly) are sssllllooooow, on my Kindle at least. NetEA PDFs and the smaller PDFs work fine. If I had more money I would have bought some kind of Pad for carrying PDFs around.

I got no experience with the Nook, but I do know that the most interesting feature (lending books to other Nook owners) is nerfed to hell and unavailable on half the books you buy anyway. Kindle's got nothing like that of course, so it shouldn't be a deal breaker.

I love my Kindle. it is very easy on the eyes, since it isnt backlit. It is light and battery life is VERY good. I have no experience with the nook

Have you tried optimizing it by reducing the image quality? I got my copy of the core rules down to 2.8M from 6.2M using ghostscript. Much faster on my ageing laptop.

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That helped quite a bit, thanks. It's still slow, but it's a lot more usable now.

But damn, Ghostscript was a bitch to figure out...

You can either buy books via amazon's webpage, or directly on the kindle. If you know the title it's a simple search to find it, but you can also browse (I usually prefer to browse the books on regular internet). Then you click the "buy" button and it downloads in a minute or two. You need to have given them credit card details, but you'll have to do that to buy the kindle in the first place.

Buying from places with no drm is a bit more complicated, but still very simple. You can either email them to your kindle (I don't, because it costs a couple of dollars for international customers AFAIK) or you can connect the kindle to the computer and move the files that way (windows treats it as a usb drive). Baen books has a service where they email books directly to your kindle when you buy it, if you want to.

Finally, you'll want to download Calibre. You can use it to manage your books, but it's also excellent for converting files to kindle-readable formats.

Haven't tried BL myself, but reportedly they sell their ebooks in non-DRM mobi format (which is the native kindle format).

I've got 2 books from black library and had no issues with them on the kindle. Pretty sure I just docked it and copied the files on, but I may have emailed one of them and retrieved it over wireless.

You can email books as long as you only connect via wi-fi for free. If you use 3G mobile to get files you will be charged, but as I didn't buy a 3G enabled model I'm fine.

Just go somewhere that offers free wi-fi and your good. Even in the UK it's not that hard to find a free wireless connection you can use. But when you consider you have to buy the BL books from their website and download them, you're going to copy them directly from your pc 99% of the time.