Whether I buy it from one of my computers or directly from the Kindle, they are accessible through the Kindle.
I had the same complaints as Ken did about understanding how to close one book and open another one. I read through the online manual and found out how to do it, but it was still a lot more difficult than I wanted it to be, both with the Paperwhite and with the Kindle Fire. When Robin got a new iPad Mini and gave me her other one, I started just reading with the Mini and re-homed my Kindles. Since the Paperwhite is really lightweight, if I were going to have another Kindle, I would choose that one and just immerse myself in the online tutorials until I could make it work easily for me. It looks like amazon has all of their Kindles on sale right now, and probably will have them on sale again for the big Black Friday sales next month. Some options come with a free 3 month trial of Kindle Unlimited, and if a person reads a lot, this is a good bonus deal also. Kindles store hundred of books if you want to keep them on the tablet; but i leave most of mine in the cloud and just download them as I want to read them. You set it up on kindle so when you buy/rent the book, it automatically loads onto your Kindle or other tablet. Mine just download onto my Mini since I no longer have a kindle. The mini is lightweight, but still heavier than a Kindle and just a little larger screen than a Paperwhite.
I see that they have memory options. That would just be for the number of books i wanted to store on the Kindle at any given time...meaning I could save books on my laptop and move them over when I wanted to read them? I may wait until Black Friday. I'm not that motivated to get a Prime membership.
You do not need a prime member ship to have a kindle, any amazon membership works for both buying it and using it, and it should qualify for free shipping also due to the price.
I think the memory would affect the speed rather than the storage, although there are options for storage as well. You can also add a mini SD card to increase the amount of storage. I don't know about the Paperwhite, though. All of my Kindle Fires have SD cards, but I haven't come close to filling the storage that comes with them, so the SD cards probably weren't necessary.
I have never needed extra storage either , and I have well over 600 book in my amazon library. Since I have Bookbub and Bookgorilla, I watch for books I am interested in and get them when they are either free or really cheap and add them to my library. If you are interested in watching movies on the Kindle, then a Fire tablet would be a better choice, since it is a full tablet, whereas the Paperwhite is only set up for reading books.
I tried that once to see how it would go. It played fine, and the resolution was good, but it's a small screen, even on the 10. Yeah, that's one thing to keep in mind: that the Paperwrite is solely an e-book reader, while the Kindle Fire is a tablet computer.