I know there are a few readers out there now, but I am going to stick with this one because it has the amazon whisper net behind it. The ability to buy a book anywhere at anytime is quite frankly awesome. I can't recommend this enough if you travel a lot. It can hold up to 1500 non illustrated books according to the Amazon website, which makes taking a lot of reading material with you a piece of cake. Highlighting sections, and adding notes as well as a built in dictionary are great tools. I wish I had this back when i was in college. it could have made my backpack much lighter

Drawbacks are that it isn't in color but none of the readers are so that can't be held against it, certain file formats cant be read on it, and not every book amazon are available for the Kindle. The small screen can sometimes be frustrating when you set the text size to large because of the amount of times you have to turn the page. If you think this will be a problem you should probably go for the larger format Kindle DX.

All in all I love this product and will keep it until they come out with a color one.