2 cool! The iPad 2

Pros: The color display is sharp, impressive, and lends itself well to e-reading. Apps like Morris (an interactive picture book with moving pictures and audio) and T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland (which includes analysis and commentary, images of original drafts, readings of selected sections, etc.) show how much the iPad's features can enhance the reading experience. I didn't have any trouble with the backlit screen, but found the slight glare from a lamp faintly annoying. iBooks, Apple's e-reading app, was easy to use; the shelves were visually a nice way to organize content, and I like that iBooks can view and store PDFs. In-text features like the dictionary, bookmarking and highlighting were helpful, too (though how to "un-highlight"?). Most importantly, being able to access a class syllabus, Wikipedia, or anything on the web while reading was hugely useful. When compared to the black-and-white Kindle, for example, a multitasking color tablet seems like a no-brainer.

Cons: The iPad gets heavy quickly if simply held in your hand. Although I used it only on the Metro to and from work, and for a few hours one evening, the battery was down to 70-75% after relatively little use. It's also quite expensive, even for all of the iPad's capabilities. A small quibble: when viewing PDFs (though the ability to do so is nice), a reader can't continuously scroll down. This means that, unless the page is at full-screen zoom (often rendering the text illegible), you must scroll down, then flip sideways to continue reading. And a final note: different orientations resulting in different layouts, I found that being unable to picture the position of text on the page made it more difficult to recall the content, for some reason.

Bottom Line: Though a staunch fan of print, I'd definitely purchase an iPad 2... if I had $500 lying around.