Dear Diary, I was thinking of replacing you with an iPad, but...

Here is my experience using the iPad.

I do not have an iPhone or an iMac, but I do own an iPod. I have never used an iPad.

Overall, my disappointment outweighed my delight with this device.

Pros

1. The iPad lets you hilite, make notes, easily look up words in the dictionary and search for words throughout a text. These functions are all very nice.
2. I like the different ways you can turn a page. In print books, I often begin to turn a page before I am completely done with the page I'm reading, and I discovered you can do almost the same thing on the iPad.

Cons

I encountered several things that, for me, were broken.

1. I did not know how to turn on the device. This is kind of a big deal. I figured you simply hit the small button on the bottom of the device, but I had to be told how to turn it on (I won't spoil it in case you don't know, either). I consider the on-off button to be a broken design.
2. Upon getting the machine on, I was struck by the clarity of the screen, its crispness, but also how it reflected back at me in certain lights. Also, I found myself tiring easily reading the device in dim light.
3. I poked around the Apps store. It was easy to navigate. However, when I chose to view the listings by name, there was only one option: alphabetical from A to Z. There was no option I could find that would let me search from Z to A, or even to skip ahead to B or see the listings under C without having to go through ALL the A and B listings. I give this feature a B for broken.
4. Some of the apps offer a link to the developer website. This is a nice option, and upon selection it quickly opens the Web browser to the site you chose. However, there is no "back" button to return to your spot in the Apps store. So I had to close out of the Web browser and go back and open up the Apps store again. This is annoying and broken.

Here are few broken things I encountered while reading. I opened up a sample of "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close," by Jonathan Safran Foer (which I have not read, but it's on my to-read list!)

1. There are a few illustrations in the print edition. In the e-version sample, the illustrations do not appear in the same places, and they run over to two screens, so the second screen has just a sliver of the illustration, and the rest of the screen is blank. This is weird (and broken).
2. I could not figure out a way to change the view to landscape format (broken for landscape lovers).
3. There is a section in the print version where the narrator is looking at a newspaper clipping, which has been marked with a red pen. In the print book, the marking is red. In the e-version, the marking is not red (it looks like something in color that is printed in grayscale).

So overall, I would be hard pressed to purchase an iPad primarily as a reading device.