Verified answer

I have a friend who has self-published her books through CreateSpace, which puts your book into paperback as well as makes it available on the kindle. She's no best seller, but she's doing well. She sells a whole lot more Kindle books than paperbacks. About 100 or so per month.

I have a Kindle and I love it, but because I've never tried any other e-reader, I can't say as I know the downsides. It is a good way to go though.

FYI: Literary Agents don't market as someone else thought. Publishers do. In order to get a publisher, you have to get an agent, since most of them don't take unsolicited manuscripts. So, don't look for a publishing house. Look for an agent.

Try getting the "Guide to Literary Agents" book and do your homework.

Lack of serendipity: the kindle lacks the richness of browsing and discovery that a traditional book collection allows, especially of titles that one may not have considered reading based on prior reading history (which is a logical next step in kindle technological evolution).

This is in line with some trends of general preference-based fragmentation and specialization that have been emerging online. By using recommendation algorithms and participating only in like-minded communities, probability of exposure to substantially different content is reduced.

2. Inability to skim as effectively: One strategy of quickly skimming a book is the flip-through. In the kindle this is impossible because of the slowness of page loads and the inability to easily jump by arbitrary predefined spaces (e.g. 4, 10 pages at a time). There may be a technical solution to this but it is something books do well.

From a technical perspective

1. Slowness: commands take forever to process; this makes it hard to speed read, flip-through and creates a generally monotonous rhythm.

2. Clunky interaction: the interface imposes multiple steps to achieve frequent actions (such as taking notes or looking things up).

3. Poor design: the kindle / buttons simply doesn't fit that nicely in your hand. Unlimited by form (besides having a screen) an eReader could be something that seems designed for humans to use.

4. It has a battery: as long as the battery life may be, it is still a limiting factor, esp. for those of us who forget to charge their electronics (or turn off whispernet).

5. No color: a major component of some books, presumably this won't be an issue in future releases.

The screen only holds about 18 lines of text. This was the most significant drawback for us. We would have linked to have a bit more to read before scrolling. Of course, having more lines also would have made the Kindle larger and, as is, the device is the near perfect size. (Perhaps it could be a little taller). Still, Spot Cool Stuff has always been one to want everything.

Hold and feel. There’s something about physically holding onto the Kindle that feels a little unnatural to us.

The scroll button placement. Maybe it was the specific way in which I was using the Kindle but we found ourselves occasionally hitting the scroll button on the edges of the Kindle by accident. That didn’t happened often but it was annoying to have to go back and find our place when we did.

The scrolling is a little slow when navigating page-by-page with the side buttons; the scrolling is instantaneous when moving one line at a time with the track ball.

There are features I wish the Kindle had. I think the Kindle is crying out for a touch screen. Also, the screen only displays in black and white (how 1980s!) and can not show video. The dictionary user interface is a bit clunky. And we wish books could be downloaded at 3G speeds.

One final note: Some users have complained about the cost of books for the Kindle. We think maybe this comes from a preconception that electronic content should be free. Most books are cheaper in Kindle-version than in print. Spot Cool Stuff’s airport read, Fareed Zakaria’s brilliant The Post-American World cost us $9.99 on the Kindle book site. Through Amazon the print version would have been $15.57.

Some people like the feeling of holding a book and owning a book shelf and that sort of stuff

Try a literary agency to market your book for you.

Four words: it's not the iPad.