Friday, June 11, 2010

iPad or Amazon Kindle?

Turning a page on the iPad - the beginning to ...Image by mikebaird via Flickr
The book nerd in me wants to know if I should buy an iPad or an Amazon Kindle?

Did I say I was a nerd?

Last week, I was in Best Buy at Bellingham, Washington. I was looking for a new digital camera, while my nephew was looking at SLR cameras. We went to the Apple section and played with iPads. Wanna guess which icon I pressed first? That's right: the iBooks app. It was fun going from one book to another. It's just like reading a physical book! Stephen King's Under The Dome was in the library and I almost started reading it. (I got the hardcover edition as a Christmas gift.) Do y'all realize how many more books I can read on the iBooks app? A lot more. I won't even have to worry about buying gigantic hardcover books, like the aforementioned Stephen King book and Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol. But there's not much else that I want in the iPad (aside from the iBooks and watching TV episodes on a bigger monitor) so spending CAD $549 on it is nuts. I could buy a new BlackBerry phone with that amount.

On the other hand, the Amazon Kindle is strictly for reading books, newspapers, and magazines. You can even read your own documents. The original device is small enough for my needs, but I think the new Kindle is as big as the iPad. Plus I can download books quickly, thanks to the Kindle's global 3G wireless coverage. It costs USD $259 or approximately CAD $267, about half the cost of an iPad.

Regardless of what I decide to get, I would save physical library space (although I don't have an actual physical library) and my mother won't freak out every time I buy a new book from Chapters, Black Bond Books, or Amazon. Also, the books cost less than the bookstore list price.

Or maybe I should just stick to reading the plain old book?
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