Confluence of events -- over my vacation I started reading the "Girl Who..." trilogy at the behest of Ms. D and her friend Ms. H, and they're good. Very entertaining. I don't have the third one, which I plan to procure.

Meanwhile, this weekend while trying to kill some time waiting for Ms. D while she got her glasses fixed, I was in a Best Buy and got to fumbling around with the Nook. I found it interesting -- a bit tough to navigate initially, but then it kicked in and starting doing some cool stuff. Ultimately it got me thinking that a nice little reader of some kind could be what the doctor ordered -- might even be how I decide to read "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest."

Later, it occurred to me that the Kindle had also lowered it's prices as well. (Congrats, Amazon -- marketing works.) So I went to Amazon and floated around on the site for a while and *almost* bought one this weekend.

Since I've pretty much been wrapped up in the idea of getting an iPad (when the stars align and the $500+ makes sense), I haven't thought much about a Kindle or Nook. Now I'm second guessing that.

Things I would use it for -- reading books (a plus for Kindle or Nook over iPad, IMHO) as well as for some quick surfing from my easy chair -- I like to read Wikipedia and IMDB entries about movies I've just watched. While buzzing around the Amazon.com site, I also got in my head the possibility that I might consume the New York Times on a regular basis if I had it in a fabulously portable format.

Advantages to the iPad, of course, are that I would also use it for app development and testing (for JFP and BOOM) as well as more in-depth surfing, perhaps some Netflix watching, documents, perhaps even sales, PDFs, flipbooks (again for sales or for demo-ing our publications) and other things I haven't thought about, like GTD processing.

But, iPad is $500 down the road and these things are less expensive. And enticing. And shiny (actually, rather matte, but you know what I mean). Hmm.