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Comment by gamble | Hacker News Reader

The Kindle is best at reading straight-forward linear text with minimal formatting, like novels. You can't go wrong with a Kindle if you read plenty of novels, especially if you read outside.

OTOH, the iPad is far superior for heavily formatted text and graphical content. Even the Kindle DX has terrible support for PDFs and the eInk screen is inherently bad for graphics, so for the person who wants to carry textbooks, technical papers, other structured PDFs, or comic books, the iPad is the only viable option.

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Amazon has improved support for PDFs. Here's from their Kindle page:

"Improved PDF Reader

Now with new dictionary lookup, notes and highlights, and support for password protected PDFs. Easily carry all of your documents on the go."

Yeah, it should be emphasized that it matters what you're reading.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/mobile/07/26/ipad.universit...

>Students at Reed College complained of the slow refresh rate of e-Ink displays, problematic input, inability to load PDFs over the network, and inability to view more than one text at a time as major sticking points. Reed faculty found converting documents to work well on the Kindle to be particularly difficult in most cases.

>Students participating in the test at Darden School of Business, while loving the Kindle for personal reading, overwhelmingly felt the Kindle didn't pass muster in its current state for academic use -- about 4 out of 5 would not recommend a Kindle DX to incoming MBA students.

> iPad is far superior for heavily formatted text

True in theory, not so much in practice. After having read a couple of books in iBooks, the books mostly seem like hasty OCR jobs (Ender's Game, while a fantastic book, definitely showed this). The iPad has the capability to do great formatting, but publishers don't seem to be doing a whole lot with it. For example, in Ender's Game, there's a little snippet of conversation before each chapter. In print it's very clearly differentiated with italics, the iBooks version lacks even that. Curiously, I seem to notice far fewer formatting problems with the Kindle app.

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