Kindle e-reader experiment ends

The Kindle 2 I purchased in late April is on its way back to Amazon.  There's nothing wrong with it.  Well, maybe there is.  Or maybe there's something wrong with me.  Who can say?

My motivation for purchasing an e-book reader was simple enough.  I wanted to be able to have my programming reference manuals and textbooks on hand everywhere I went.  Each of those books runs between 600 and 1,000 pages, so you can imagine what just one of them weighs.  Now throw ten of them in a backpack and take a walk.  Ouch.

This plan fell apart for a couple of reasons:

• The manuals I use daily are from publishers that haven't jumped on the Kindle bandwagon, so their books aren't in the format that works best on the device.  They do have MOBI and PDF versions and I purchased a few.  Neither format worked flawlessly on the Kindle (MOBIs were difficult to search through and you have to convert PDFs through Amazon before they will work, and even then they're a mess).
  
• I spend the majority of my book time with one finger in the index.  When the index lists several pages for the topic I'm looking for, it's very easy to refer back to the index entry with that finger between the pages.  Try as I might, I couldn't find a way to do this with the Kindle.  Maybe my finger isn't small enough.
• A week after my Kindle arrived, Amazon announce the Kindle DX, with a larger screen, more memory and native PDF support.  It was made for exactly the type of e-reading I had planned to do.  If I can get my hands on one to try it out, I may consider the upgrade.

Those of you who aren't as geeky as myself might enjoy the Kindle 2 more than I did.  I did read some novels on it and that experience was very enjoyable, but that style of reading doesn't involve the back-and-forth motion that reference books require. 

So I'm headed back to the drawing board.