“I saw the Amazon Kindle today, one of the parents was reading on it. It’s amazing! It looks just like a book! I want to gift you one provided you stop buying so many books.”

My husband called me up in the middle of the day to tell me this. He never calls me during the day. Never.

I was so stunned, all I could manage was a weak

“Umm…ok….can we talk about this in the evening?”

Now, as those of you who read this blog regularly (love you guys!) know, I love physical books. I enjoy browsing through a bookstore, picking up books, going through the back cover and then randomly reading a few pages before deciding to buy it. I have a bookshelf at home that is groaning under the weight of filled with books I’ve stuffed into it. And now, I am getting a new, bigger, fancier bookshelf built to hold my books and some doo-dads.

The husband, though, just wants the compulsive book buying to stop. Thus, the offer for the Kindle in exchange for no fewer books entering the house. And a tempting offer it is. I have been reading e-books on and off on the tiny screen of my iPhone. If I can read on that, an e-reader would be a breeze. But which one to choose?

Kindle, the dedicated e-reader or the cool kid on the block – the iPad? Much research later, I listed the pros and cons of each.

The Kindle’s e-ink technology makes it a strain-free way to read for hours; you can read it in direct sunlight but not in the dark; and the experimental browser allows you to connect to text-only sites on the internet (Wikipedia and Google) in black and white. However, it supports its own file format and transferring pdfs and epubs is painful (for me at least).

The iPad gives you the option of accessing e-books through iBooks, Kindle, Nook and many more apps; and it gives you a whole multimedia experience as well, allowing you to do a lot, lot more with it than just read. On the flip side, the brighter screen can be impossible to read in direct sunlight (not quite true, since I can bump up the brightness on my iPhone and read very clearly even in direct sunlight, thank you very much) and the battery life is lower compared to the Kindle.

Of course, there are the issues of weight and technical wizardry – and this is more of an apples to oranges comparison – but if you have the money to spare, the iPad definitely gives you more bang for your buck.

Plus, since I’m really not going to completely stop buying books ever, I may as well go for the other bells and whistles too, right? Which makes me lean (heavily) towards the iPad. Now, to con convince the husband to fork over the extra cash!