1. No monthly fees (unless you get a subscription, at which point you at least know what you're getting for the money). This seems silly maybe, but I'd not have purchased one if I had to keep paying for it as time goes on.
2. I can download stuff using the phone network, so ideally almost anywhere (in the States of course) I can click a button and have a book in less than a minute. (That minute statistic really does seem to be true in my experience.) Not too sure how the coverage will be in BFE Colorado though.
3. I can shop for books either from my computer, which is most common for me _or_ from the Kindle directly.
4. I can convert lots of different files (including .mobi and .pdf to be read on the Kindle. Actually, I'm pretty sure they don't technically need to be converted… Just some of the formatting, especially of those with pictures is potentially sketchy from what I've heard.
5. There are about a bazillion places where you can just plain get free books to put on the thing.
6. The little silver scroll indicator thingy really is cool!
7. You can hold ~200 books on the Kindle itself and can increase that number by a whole lot just by using an SD card. (Not that I've even gotten to the point where this is useful to me yet.) All in a package that's lighter and smaller than most trade paperback books. This makes it super cool for traveling!
8. The battery lasts for a _really_ long time when the wireless is off. And you can buy new ones, which is always a plus!
9. Oh, and the samples you can download to find out if you might like a book before you buy it.
10. And you can search your entire library for keywords!
11. And, I'm sure I could think of more, but the most important for me was the e-ink screen.

To make a couple comments on the notes above… _Many_ of the books for the Kindle are less than $5. The new releases tend to be more expensive, but older books have quite a wide range of possible prices. For example, I purchased the complete set of the Wizard of Oz books for $0.99. I'd guess that an average would be around $5.50 though.

Technically the Kindle can do some internet work. I've read of people who use gmail on their Kindle using the mobile version though I've never tried it myself. That doesn't cover the SMS messaging though.

So, while I certainly can't argue with the original price of the thing, I'd say the Kindle might come closer to what you're looking for than you might realize!

As for things I'd like for it to improve? Mostly the organization of the library. Currently they're all just listed out. You can change _how_ they're listed (e.g. by author, title, etc.), but I really wish you could create folders or something to divide things up. Paging through a long list is pretty irritating, where paging through a smaller list of authors or genres for example would be much more manageable. The search function could help with this, but if you don't already know what you want to read next, that's relatively limited in usefulness. That's my main beef! I suspect they're working on that though, so we'll see what happens next!