> I love Apple, but the Kindle is so much better as a reader. It can't play Angry Birds, and the slow refresh rate makes it harder to flick back and forwards, forcing you to focus.

All of which is fine for a bog standard textbook, but Apple's working to make these things more useful - full color interactive experiments, video, etc.

What makes for a good reader doesn't necessarily make for a good textbook reader.

Very few textbooks are read linearly. All would benefit from solid interactivity, search and annotating capabilities.

Exactly. The basic reading experience is better on a Kindle, but once you use the glossary, take notes (and get them back as small cards, that was beautiful) and build interactivity into the text (from search up to interactive tests, video content, image slideshow or even 3D models and micro-applications) it starts creaking under the weight.

Random access speed (when going to a specific page, or to return a list of results) is also nice for a textbook, while it's not very useful for a novel.

nb: the more I think about it, the more those e-textbook sound like modern Hypercard stacks.

Textbooks need fast navigation and color. Textbooks also aren’t read like novels. All this is true of current textbooks, even without any animations, videos or interactive elements.

E-ink is a bad fit for them. All it has going for it is the lower price of available devices (which is a major plus) and that some people claim they get eyestrain from reading on LCDs (hardly an issue with textbooks).

And this is the reason that I as a Mac fanboi still don't have an iPad. However, I have no trouble reading the Kindle on my iPhone when I forget my real Kindle, leading me to believe I'm going to enjoy reading on an iPad 3, a lot, especially NYT and The Economist, which suck on Kindles.

Kindle is better for TEXT only.

iPad is incomparably better for anything that uses more than straight text.

Even today's textbooks would be very poor on Kindle compared to iPad.

But today's bestsellers are much better on Kindle than iPad, in my opinion. I like the e-ink for long periods of text reading.