Hi Kevin,
great comparison. I've been on the market for an ebook reader for a while. The kindle dx does appeal to me, but lacks features such as touchscreen/highlighting.

The sony seems to have the above...but has a smaller screen.

I see the iPad as a possible alternative...but I am worried about PDF support. Have you tried reading PDF's on the iPad?

Hey Julian,

Thanks for the thorough comparison. Reinforces my decision to buy the iPad instead of the Kindle, since I never read outside either.

I'm mostly reading Kindle books on it, because I don't find the iBooks store very usable. I like browsing books and it basically forces you to search. The Kindle app is pretty darn good. There's just one thing that iBooks has that Kindle doesn't: when you flip to horizontal, iBooks go to two pages across one screen - Kindle just makes one wider page. The wider page on the Kindle is too wide for comfortable reading, but the two page iBooks approach is perfect. If Amazon adds that to the Kindle app, I'll be a very happy Kindle book buyer, reading on my iPad.

Hey Julian,

Great Review. Seemed spot on to me.

I guess I'd just mention two things about the book reading experience. My wife who is NOT a techy/gadget person has already read two books on the iPad. She never would have done that on a Kindle I think. She just took to the book reading experience on the iPad. She got them through iBooks and likes the 2 page horizontal view because it "looks like a real book".

So far I've preferred the Kindle App simple because their book selection is much much greater then iBooks. Especially for technical/computer books.

For me, I saw the strength of the iPad on my recent plane ride home. I could quite comfortably type out a long blog post, read any of the books that I had on it, play a game, listen to music/podcasts or watch a movie.

And all those experiences are "full quality" experiences. None suffered at all.

Rob & David: I didn't know about the landscape 2-page thing. Interesting feature. I also forgot to mention in the blog entry how cool it is that you use the iPad cover as a stand to make it easier to read while eating at a small table.

Patrick: I haven't tried converting and reading a PDF yet. Volker mentioned http://calibre-ebook.com last week and it seems like that would do the job, as would the Kindle service where you can e-mail yourself a PDF and have the Amazon service convert it for you. No idea how good the conversion of either method is though.

i read a few books on my ipad without getting eyesteain but i only read 1-2 hours at a time no matter how i read , i like reading the same book more than once so scroll to the "fun" parts and thats would just be painfull on the kindle , sunlight will be a issue but prephaps there will be some 2nd hand kindles around