I loaded up almost a hundred books to my Kindle from Project Gutenberg. There are other free (legal) eBook locations such as Baen Free Library. For the $80 Kindle, that's likely worth it, even without accessing the vast illegal (in the US at least) sources. I agree they're definitely bad for PDF, text books, or anything else you'll want to flip back and forth; only good for sequential reading (novels and the like). They're very reliable and last a long time.