On e-reading

Over the winter I joined the ranks of the e-reader-owning public. Gadget lust was only part of my reasoning; I read a lot of conference/journal submissions and wanted some way to avoid printing them (I don't keep them after the reviews are done) and further screwing up my eyes by reading them from a laptop display. Since the kindle doesn't play PDF, I picked up the Sony PRS-505. Turns out it doesn't do a great job on PDF either, but there are some 3rd-party apps like Calibre and Rasterfarian that do a passable job of converting them. Once that was sorted out, I was left with the problem of figuring out what else to do with the gadget. I still like to read paper books, and I don't want the hassle of doing daily updates of news/RSS feeds to the device.
So I found a middle ground: lengthy news/magazine articles from the web that are too long for reading from a laptop screen. For example, I loaded WaPo's great series on the AIG meltdown and the New Yorker's 2006 article on the solving of the Poincaré conjecture.
It works well, but I think these devices have a ways to go before they make themselves indispensable. Seth Godin had a great post listing the possibilities for social features in the Kindle. Once that starts to happen (and there is decent support for PDF for chrissakes), you might see a lot more of them around.