Looking For Advice For My Wife's Christmas Present. She Doesn't Have An i-Pad Or lap-top. She Loves To Read In Bed. May Surf The Web Occasionally, But Mostly Reads At Night. Thanks, All! :-) :-)
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Kindle w/e-ink.
Posted via Mobile Device
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I have a Kindle and my wife uses an iPad so from what I can tell the Kindl Fire is probably your best bet. I say this because the Kindle Fire looks to have a lighted screen like the iPad which would make it easier to read in the dark. With the regular kindle you need good lighting or a book light to read. The upside on the regular Kindle is the battery life and the ability to read it in bright sunlight. I haven't seen a Kindle Fire and don't know much about it, but I use my Kindle everyday and it's great. I just upgraded my wife's iPad to the new OS and it is really using up the charge much faster than the previous OS, but she loves it.
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It may be counter-intuitive but using a back-lit screen in the dark is actually harder on your eyes and causes more eye-strain then using a book light on a book (or Kindle).

My wife has an iPad and I have a Kindle and I have the Kindle app for the iPad. The iPad sucks as an e-reader. Glossy, back-lit screens are too limiting and cause too much eyestrain. The iPad and Kindle are both good at what they do but I don't think it makes sense to use them where they are not so good...
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This really isn't about the iPad but the Kindle Fire that the OP was asking about. I can't comment on the eye strain with the iPad as I don't use it as an an e-reader, but I did find this ZDNet article on it.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/ipa...e-reader/12719
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Thanks For All The Input, Guys!:-)
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I got a fire and love it. It lights up at night and also has a control to increase brightness outside. I do not know about reading on the beach in full sun but seems fine on the porch!!
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Kindle or Kindle Fire...I think either would be a great gift but I must say I love my ipad2!!!!
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I Have An i-Pad2 & Love It, Also!:-) Does The Fire Do Almost Everything The i-Pad2 Does? I Believe You Can't Surf The Web With The Regular Kindle, Correct?

Thanks!:-)
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Correct, the regular Kindle is can't surf the web. I believe you have to go up to at least the Kindle Touch. I was looking at the Fire myself but opted for the Ipad2 because of the larger screen. Plus I'm a Apple slappy.
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Love Mac's....I have been using them for the last ten or so years (went to college for GD)!! I just actually picked up, along with my ipad2, a Mac Book Pro. Not to turn this into a Mac thread but the Kindle's are nice though my wifes mother has the Fire and she seems to enjoy it :-)
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nook Color or nook Tablet. 'nough said
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I was trying to push a friend of mine into getting a Fire instead of some off brand tablet. For the price and what they can do its hard to pass up. But if all you're looking for is an ereader a regular kindle is tough to beat.
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I agree with this.
The single biggest reason why I don't like the Kindle Fire: 8GB built in memory without a way to expand it. And only about 5.5GB of that is usable for content.

Amazon wants you to use their cloud storage for the bulk of your library. Which is fine in theory but in practice, it runs into a couple of problems:

1. Kindle Fire (and for that matter Nook Tablet) both can only squeeze out about 6 to 10 hours of battery life (depending on screen brightness), but if you have WiFi on, you're going to see that battery life drop a significant amount.

2. I can't always guarantee that I will be near a WiFi access point when I'm out and about--especially if I'm vacationing (i.e., camping somewhere). Kindle Fire has no 3G/4G data connection so if this is the case, you're not going to be able to access any content other than what's stored on your device.

3. I have a massive amount of content which isn't all purchased from a single source (some music, some video, a lot of PDFs from various publications, etc...). If you don't have a lot of non-Amazon content, this is probably not a big problem for you.

Given these two factors, Nook (with the ability to toss in a big old microSD card) makes it a lot easier for me to maintain my library.

However, having said all that, if you're only interested in an ebook reader, I would actually recommend the Nook Simple Reader. It has an absolutely absurd battery life (I can go for weeks without recharging it) and also provides for microSD card expansion. And as an owner of both the Nook Color & Nook Simple Reader, the latter is a lot easier to read than the former.

A big knock against the Nook Simple Reader is content management: It blows donkey balls. If you don't properly set the metadata on the content you copy onto the device, good luck finding it. Nook Color (and I assume Tablet) gives you a simple folder/sub-folder view of your storage so as long as you know where you copied the file, you can find it. Nook Simple Reader flattens that whole thing and tries to index everything based on metadata (author/publisher/series, etc...).
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Any Truth To The Rumor That Amazon Is Taking Over The Reader Market & Nook (Barnes & Noble) Will Soon Go Out Of Business???:-)
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I have to say neither, go with Nook Simple Touch or Nook Color/Tablet...

My wife has first gen Nook e-ink, I have a Nook Color and I got my sister-in-law a Nook Simple Touch for Christmas, which I opened and inspected just to make sure it works....

That new Simple is pretty amazing.. the content management does kinda suck, but if you take the time to setup your shelves its not that bad. The page turns on it blow the 1st gen e-ink away, VERY impressive how much faster it is. Its extremely light weight, and has a large 'ridge' that your finger will naturally hook into while holding it..

The Nook supports significantly more file types also, which is nice. You can hack the nook color and make it a full blow android tablet very easily as well... which will give you access to the Market and you can even run the Kindle app on it if you wish (irony!).

The limitations, and poor reviews so far, of the Kindle and Kindle Fire really surprise me coming from a company like Amazon, who wants to dominate everything they do.
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Interesting. So You Definitely Feel The Nook Is A Better Product? B&N Will Be Around For Many More Years? Thanks!:-)
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Thats the best part, even if B&N does go OOB (which I really dont see happening), you can put the Kindle app on the Nook Color/Tablet! :-)

You'd have to use another program to convert the files to get them into a type that the Kindle likes, then email them to yourself at amazon to get them in the 'cloud'... what a pain!

Intersting read..

http://theweek.com/article/index/217...snt-4-theories
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Not exactly true. Or as big a pain as you might think.

I use a shareware program called Calibre to organize my ebook library of stuff I don't buy directly from Amazon. Calibre will easily convert formats to be compatible with Kindle, iPad, iPhone, Nook, Sony and a slew of other eReaders. So, the number of supported formats for an eReader is a moot point.

:-)
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Thanks, Peter & Thrak!:-)
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