Amazon Kindle

No regrets as yet but after paying 7.99 for a novel recently it struck me that there may be no competition in pricing, I'm probably never going to get the opportunity to buy a book "on sale", I can't "borrow" books, nor buy reduced price second hand books.....

Too true. It's not Amazon though, it's the publishers. The publishers are currently dictating market price, I think in time they'll get spanked by competition law, but right now some publishers are over-pricing their books.

Are there any options for any of the above, is it possible to convert books to pdf? would this be considered piracy? when until recently lending or giving someone a second-hand book wouldn't have been.....are we buying a "book" or a license to read?

Anything you do will be considered piracy, but if the book publishers wish to make the same mistakes as the music industry I don't see what other choices you have. In which case, you might as well go the whole hog: http://bibliotik.org/ < Torrents for eBooks