[Puppage]

Well, if you have a kindle you have tied yourself to Amazon

That's not true. All you need is the shareware eCalibre. It's an eBook manager & can also convert from epub to mobi (Kindle's format) to pdf , etc. etc.

I use it all the time. Works great.

http://calibre-ebook.com/

[Truth29]

Thanks, but you would still have to pay for the kindle downloads, right? If course, with a general Ereader or software, you have the freedom to go to a lot of other sources.