Regarding your Guttenberg docs that vanished into the ether: Did you mail them from a different email address than is associated with your Amazon account (for example, from a workplace email)? As a spam filter, your Kindle will (OOTB) only accept emailed docs from the email account that Amazon has on file. You can manually add additional permitted email accounts from the "Manage Your Kindle" page on amazon.com. I just found this out after trying to email some software manuals from my work email (my home email was, at the time, the only one associated with my amazon account). Hope this helps.

Oh, and welcome to the Kindle club!

The Kindle view of the Amazon bookstore is hard to use. If you're on the 15th page of a listing and you accidentally exit by hitting Back, when you re-enter the listing you have hit Next 14 times to get back to where you were (unless there's a shortcut I'm missing.) And it's entirely too easy when visiting a book's description page to accidentally buy a copy by hitting the button twice. I accidentally left my Kindle when I stuffed it in my book bag, and it bought 7 copies of a book. (Amazon refunded it without much difficulty.)

Still, those are relatively small problems. My Kindle 2 makes is a lot easier to deal with the "I'm not sure what I want to read next" issue without having to carry a lot of books around. And I too found the Kindle to be invisible once I started using it. Reading the first novel I downloaded, I was caught up in the story after a few minutes and wasn't paying attention to the technology at all.

When I need her to read something, I e-mail it to the Kindle account. Here's how to do it — send a blank e-mail to the Kindle's e-mail account and attach what you want put on the Kindle as an attachment. It will take either .pdf or .doc files.