Buy the Old One Instead

I took a moment to read a blog I enjoy, The Curzon Group, a blog devoted to thrillers in the mould of the old British thrillers like Forsythe's The Dogs of War. It's a fun blog to drop in on every now and then.

Today, Peter Stuart Smith writes about e-readers and the future of publishing. It's an interesting post for anyone who intends to read or write or publish in the future, but the passage I zeroed in on was this one:

So if you are thinking about buying one of the new devices principally to read books, don’t bother. Get the old-style one, and you won’t regret it for a moment. But if you really are the kind of person who wants to sit by yourself in a corner somewhere, watching a film on a screen you can cover with the palm of your hand, without a doubt the Fire will be a far better buy for you than the iPad.

As an owner of a Kindle and an iPad, anyone who has read this blog knows that I love my Kindle and can read about that in these posts. I love that the battery life is so long, I love that it synchronizes with all my other devices, and that I can take it anywhere with little or no trouble. But lately I've also read on the iPad. I don't know why he thinks a Fire would be better than an iPad. They seem pretty much the same in terms of reading, but the iPad has better or more powerful capabilities beyond just reading.

I agree with "buying the old one instead" and going with an old school Kindle for reading. But the Fire? I don't know why it would be better than the iPad.