"So You Got an Amazon Kindle This Holiday Season: Now What?" from Mashable

Assuming you’re like me, the first thing you’ll want to do is load your device with as many free books as possible. Amazon offers thousands of free e-books in the Kindle Store, which are divided into two sections: popular classics and rotating, limited-time offers. There are a number of other resources for free e-books outside of the Kindle Store as well. Collectively, millions of titles are available through Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive (mainly historical items useful for academic work), Open Library, ManyBooks.net, LibriVox (audiobooks), Fictionwise, Bookyards and Planet eBook. In most cases, you’ll need to download the e-books and transfer them to your Kindle using a USB cable. For more information, see here. In addition, you can port any of your PDF files for reading on your Kindle device, as well as access hundreds of thousands of other (and more contemporary) titles in the Kindle Store, usually priced at $9.99 or less.

No, actually; have to disagree here. Although we definitely believe that the Kindle is the best reader out there, in terms of long form reading; it isn't by any measure at all fluid. Devices with just a thousand titles will begin to slow down all versions of the Kindle. Flipping a page gets slow even. We all use Kindles. The iPad's to heavy and gets hot; it's not ideal for long form reading. The Nook's got the same constraints as the iPad; size doesn't proportionately translate into reading values. With the cheapest model of the Kindle, you get the most bang per buck. But all that said, it still isn't fluid. So don't load up your Kindle with titles that you aren't going to read anyway. Navigating through thousands of titles can get a bit laborious. On last year's versions of all of the Kindle models, you'll experience terribly slow search through those titles. That's what the cloud's for. Remember that as long as you have access to the web, through Wi-Fi or WhisperNet, then you don't have to worry about having all of those titles on your Kindle all the time. Just pack what you need for long plane rides, and you're set. Read that Mashable article here.