[Mennonite]

I own the 8 inch Kindle too. Big enough to read easily but small enough to carry around. I bought it a couple of years ago and it has been in constant use every day since then. For what I paid for it I figured it would crap out within six months, but it's still going strong. It's pretty damn durable too because I have managed to drop this ****er a million times over the years. A protective screen is advisable even if you don't have butter fingers like me. My chief complaints with the old model: keyboard can be a little glitchy if you're using it as a browser. And I think it could use more memory.

I've actually received two more of them as gifts since then. One is a much larger model and I never use it. It's just unwieldy compared to the smaller version. It's ok for watching movies or listening to audio books on though.

The third one is another 8 inch model. It being the newest it has three times as much memory and a better speaker. There is one major drawback if you use pirated books in that it won't play them. Easily fixed with a bit of modding. I think I had to download 4 files and it took all of 10 minutes. You will want to mod it a little no matter what so that you can access Google Play for more aps.

Edit:

I read a pretty good sci-fi short story recently called "The Lone and Level Sands" by Marco Panessa