How much do you like to read? How tight are your finances?
The tech's not going to settle down for several years, and there's going to be an ongoing battle between "what the techies can design to work well" and "what the marketing agents think they can sell best."
In the meantime--the readers available now work very well for leisure reading. They suck for textbook use. (That's probably going to remain true for a while; the obstacles are non-trivial.) For that matter, the readers available 5 years ago work very well for leisure reading; I read for two solid years on a Sony Clié before switching to a dedicated ebook reader, and the Ebookwise is still considered a great reader. (The 128mb max memory card is its biggest problem. And the obsolete filetype support.)
The bells & whistles aren't going to stablize for even longer. If there's a *particular* feature you want that isn't available, or costs too much right now, you should probably wait for it; if it's just a matter of "but if I wait six months, the price will drop by 25%"... well, yeah, but you'll be out of six months of reading time.
A lot of us have been waiting for they mythical $100 ebook reader for years; right now, it only happens when things go on sale. The feature sets have gotten better--but mostly as general tech enhancements (today's batteries kick ass), not because the designers are actually paying attention to what works best. (Almost all the current ebook readers will hold *thousands* of books. None of them have good software for sorting & browsing through thousands of books.)
Mobileread has plenty of European members who can help sort out availability and prices, and there's plenty of support for people who want a reader not sold in their country, or sold for much more in some countries than others. If you want a Kindle at US cost + real shipping cost, that's available.
re: Buy now or wait
The tech's not going to settle down for several years, and there's going to be an ongoing battle between "what the techies can design to work well" and "what the marketing agents think they can sell best."
In the meantime--the readers available now work very well for leisure reading. They suck for textbook use. (That's probably going to remain true for a while; the obstacles are non-trivial.) For that matter, the readers available 5 years ago work very well for leisure reading; I read for two solid years on a Sony Clié before switching to a dedicated ebook reader, and the Ebookwise is still considered a great reader. (The 128mb max memory card is its biggest problem. And the obsolete filetype support.)
The bells & whistles aren't going to stablize for even longer. If there's a *particular* feature you want that isn't available, or costs too much right now, you should probably wait for it; if it's just a matter of "but if I wait six months, the price will drop by 25%"... well, yeah, but you'll be out of six months of reading time.
A lot of us have been waiting for they mythical $100 ebook reader for years; right now, it only happens when things go on sale. The feature sets have gotten better--but mostly as general tech enhancements (today's batteries kick ass), not because the designers are actually paying attention to what works best. (Almost all the current ebook readers will hold *thousands* of books. None of them have good software for sorting & browsing through thousands of books.)
Mobileread has plenty of European members who can help sort out availability and prices, and there's plenty of support for people who want a reader not sold in their country, or sold for much more in some countries than others. If you want a Kindle at US cost + real shipping cost, that's available.
Did that help?