On Thursday, March 2011 at 11:21:39 (GMT +0100), Keith J. Schultz:
I personally will not shell out no more that $ 50 for a dedicated reading device.
I believe that's being rather petty and unreasonable, at the cost of your own reading pleasure, and very likely also your eye-sight, which is a precious thing. Reading on a Kindle device strains your eyes far less than staring at an LCD screen. I'm not wealthy by any means, but I happily shelled out hundreds of dollars for earlier Kindle versions. Therefore, the current low price of $139 seems like bread-crumbs to me, and I can't understand how anyone who truly loves literature can fail to pay that low price to get a Kindle. ;-) Yes, $139 is for the small-screen Kindle, but that's still radically better than reading on a laptop. And, for reading on-the-go or in direct sunlight outside your home, the $139 Kindle is an unbeatable deal. (I do prefer the large Kindle DX for reading at home, because there I can also set the font to be of a comfortably large, but not huge, size -- which is another boon for your eye-sight.)
Personally, I would suggest the iPad.
The iPad is great for reading after it gets dark. But, in daylight, nothing beats a Kindle, while it would seem kind of silly to me to stare at a back-lit screen for many hours every day while there is ample light all around you, from natural sources. I do prefer the iPad over reading the Kindle while having to use a lamp to see the Kindle. Using a lamp, including a dedicated Kindle lamp, has the big disadvantage that you need to position your Kindle exactly right in relation to the source of light, such as a light-bulb, and I hate that kind of inflexibility imposed on a reader. It's so 20th century, having to turn your body/arms/hands/reading device towards the source of light, when instead you could simply use the iPad to serve as its own source of light! (Oh, and by the way, Apple introduced iPad 2 yesterday, which reduces the original iPad's weight by 15%, and its thickness by 33%, while the price remains the same: a very reasonable $499 for the basic version.)
The Kindle app is still available
But the Kindle app for the iPad/iPhone is extremely low-quality. I don't recommend it; just use Stanza instead. In addition to the outrageously wide margins, wasting lots of the iPad's screen real estate, the Kindle app does *not* offer the same functionality as the hardware Kindle. As a good example, when you want to highlight a passage in the Kindle app stretching over several pages, this is not possible in the Kindle app, and the passage you highlighted will break into 2. In contrast, on the hardware Kindle, highlighting a passage across pages works flawlessly. -- Yours, Alex. www.aboq.org [processed by "The Bat!", Version 4.2.10.12]