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I am a 21 year old college student with an avid love of Economics and reading. I am trying to decide whether to buy the new Kindle for $130 after my 15% discount at Target ( I work there and I have the debit card) or continue buying new books or going to the library. I would love to be able to use it to get old economics textbooks and other genres for cheap!

The Kindle supports PDF format, which I'd guess would be the format textbooks and class notes would show up in, as well as MOBI and EPUB. The memory capacity is fairly enormous considering how small most MOBI/EPUB/PDF files are. Other formats (RTF, DOC, etc.) can be converted to something the Kindle can read using Calibre. I'd recommend the Kindle as long as you know ebook versions of the latest editions of your texts exist - bear in mind that older texts may have been updated.

The WIFI internet also will help me get through Calculus without dying of boredom.

The Kindle web browser is readable, but the display and navigation are fairly crappy. A cheap laptop (under $500) would be a better bet for that.

AnotherUnixGeek, smart reply. I agree with the nice comments on some of the subtleties of the Kindle. However, Avid Reader and College Student? If it can possibly be afforded by this student I would recommend getting it.

$130 is cheaper than many of the worthless textbooks that students will have to buy, and it can be used to read many other books for free.

Do they make you read Jane Austen in English class? All her books and thousands of other books they might make you read are free.

For $50 more you can even get permanent free 3G connectivity with it which even allows you to "browse the web" for free almost anywhere with 3G even without the WiFi, though that is even more "clunky" than other navigation issues. And you can e-mail yourself notes that show up on the Kindle to read "offline" when you do not have your laptop.

Example, right up your alley, that I coincidentally doing just before I read this thread:

On another thread tonight the book below was advocated, and I just downloaded it for free ,and am putting it on my Kindle.

Even if it takes me a year to read it, I will finally get it read because I will have it with me for all those times when I are sitting in a waiting room, etc.

My new free book:

A Tiger by the Tail
A 40-Years’ Running Commentary on Keynesianism by Hayek
With an essay on ‘The Outlook for the 1970s:
Open or Repressed Inflation?’
by
F.A. HAYEK
Nobel Laureate 1974

Compiled and Introduced by Sudha R. Shenoy

Introduction by Joseph T. Salerno
Third Edition
Published jointly by The Institute of Economic Affairs and the Ludwig von Mises Institute

I do not think you will regret getting a Kindle. It is a cheap blip compared to the rest of your educational expenses.

Thread bump to add a new development:

Kindle gets library book lending
Users of Amazon's Kindle e-reader will soon be able to borrow electronic books from libraries in the US.
The retailer is teaming up with Overdrive, which already offers an e-book lending service through 11,000 American libraries.
Until now Kindle owners have been unable to download titles because the device uses a unique file format....
Overdrive has been in business for several years and offers hundreds of thousands of books to readers whose devices use the epub file format.
However, Amazon has its own proprietary system, based on the Mobipocket format, which includes a digital rights management system to prevent copying....

A slight addendum -- the ePub system currently used by library e-book lending systems also includes a DRM system (not surprisingly; otherwise there'd be no way to enforce a limited checkout period) -- the difference isn't between DRM and no DRM, it's between two mutually incompatible DRM systems.