iOS and Android have a Kindle app, which means every iPhone, iPad, and Android device can also be a Kindle. This fact is conspicuously missing in the analysis.
I read books constantly, and I do own a 2nd generation Kindle, but I think it is buried in a box somewhere from a move I did last fall. I do 99% of my reading these days on either my Android phone, my laptop or my desktop PC. I really think the killer feature that Amazon bring to its Kindle brand is actually "Whisper Sync" more than eInk displays or any other specific device. Being able to pick up my book from where I left off on any internet enabled device is the #1 reason my books purchases are almost exclusively from amazon.
I had a Kindle once. Lost it in a breakup. I still read more books in the Kindle app than dead tree books, and I don't miss not having a Kindle. Thanks to the Kindle app on my iPhone, reading serves as the mortar of my life, filling up all the cracks. I only used my actual Kindle at home for sit-down reading.
Interesting, the trend in calling regular books "dead tree books" and in leaving out the "e" in e-books. I have my own ideas as to why this is happening though I fear they would derail the conversation on the article at hand, thus I'll just leave it as food for thought.
I think it just means that the concept of book has separated from it's transfer medium. So "book" refers more to the content than the physical (or digital) representation. Compare to movie vs dvd.
There's ample precedent for this, as newer improvements become the norm. You won't often hear someone saying "color TV" or "unleaded gasoline" or "touch-tone phone" anymore. They became the standard, and we began to use modifiers to describe the older, rarer products.
I agree "dead tree" is a little bit derogatory, and unjustifiably so. Until e-books are strictly superior, until they are as good as physical books in every important way, we should respect what we've got.
I think my primary motivation for putting down dead tree books is that the e-books I've bought and haven't read are invisible. They don't sit on my bookshelves openly shaming me for not reading them :-O
But anyway, just to clarify, I mention that these apps exist because it could completely throw off the numbers as to how many "Kindles" (or "Nooks") there are in a given city. What if SF has tons of people reading Kindle books on their iPads? These devices can't be considered pure competitors to the Kindle (or the Nook), and their numbers are way, way too big to simply disgregard.
I've never had a problem reading text on my blackberry, or even books on my iPad - but since I got a Kindle I do far, far prefer it to the iPad.
Maybe that's largely a personal opinion or maybe most people would agree with me, but either way my point is - yeah, it's not "too bad", and is perfectly fine, but it doesn't mean it's not significantly worse.
YMMV, but I found reading books on my transformer a lot more comfortable after I switched the kindle app over to white-on-black rather than black-on-white. It was enough that I almost gave up on my actual kindle for a while.
All this pre-retina? I find pre-retina text display blurry to the point of distraction after long periods of reading. Also, how do you hold your iPad? I like the newest and cheapest Kindle's size and weight for holding it an almost any position for long periods of time.
The last 2 books I've read (the hunger games ones) were all bought and read on my 2 android devices (Galaxy Nexus and SIMless HTC Nexus). Cross-sync is awesome. I read on planes and before sleeping (you can invert the colors to have black background) The worst part is that I have an actual Kindle (albeit old)... somewhere. I don't miss it. At all. I love reading the kindle app on the phone anywhere, even buying the next one on the spot.
I have 2 Kindles, an iPhone and an iPad (latest generation) and I use the kindle app on them all. There's no issue with the iPhone and iPad - indeed there are times when I prefer them. The Kindle is also much better (at times) than using the iPad
I've read for hours on end on everything from a Palm IIIxe(Back-lit 160x160 grey-scale) and Palm T|X(320x480 color LCD) to a Kobo(e-Ink) and an iPad2. I've had no problems with any of them.