My wife bought me an Amazon Kindle for Christmas.  The $399 Kindle is Amazon's entry into the ebook space.  I'll say right up front, I just don't see how it will ever replace physical books.  The visual and tactile experience of reading a traditional book will be too hard to shake.  On the other hand, it's pretty chill and a nice complement to all the other gadgets we carry around in an effort to manage the information inflow.  It operates completely independent of your computer (although you can connect to download stuff to your computer if you like).  Rather, it is always connected, at no cost, to a wireless network.  You can browse the book store, which has 100,000 titles, and when you find something you want to read, you just push a button and a couple minutes later the book has been downloaded to the device.  Even before adding an optional memory card, the Kindle will hold a couple hundred books.  And you can subscribe to a wide variety of magazines and newspapers as well.  The display technology is excellent.  It doesn't use the eyeball-attacking backlit LCD technology (as on computers); rather it successfully attepmts to replicate the experience of reading a normal book page.  Thus, gotta have light, just like with book.  Battery life before a recharge is pretty good also.