[johndoesecond]

[QUOTE=poshm;760107]I am thinking about buying a Kindle (2 or DX) for my hubby.

Note taking and highlighting on Kindle has been discussed several times around these forums.

Here's a little round up and my personal opinions:

1. You can (1) highlight, (2) take notes and (3) bookmark pages on ebooks in, well, ebook formats readable by Kindle (.mobi and the like)

2. On PDFs, you can only bookmark pages

Kindle doesn't feature touch screen (finger or stylus), so you basically navigate through the ebook page with the little joystick and then:
a) press it, move left or right, press again, to highlight
b) start typing on the keyboard to take the note

Does it do the job? I have Kindle DX, and it works well for me. Yes, the keyboard is not too ergonomic, and maybe the navigation through the page (viz. point to the point you want to highlight or take the note on) would be faster on a touch screen, but there are advantages to it:

1. finger touch screen would have a lot of fingerprints, and given that e-ink is as close as it gets to real paper, but not actually there yet, I would get frustrated with a dirty screen; plus, who knows how precise it would be to point the exact desired position, bringing about additional frustration of re-tapping;

2. stylus touch screen would require you to keep the stylus in or at your hand, so it would be somewhat unpractical;

3. freehand notes and sketches (basically stored as pictures, like in Irex’s way) would look more intuitive, but with Kindle you actually get your highlighted texts and notes in digital text format, so, say, when you connect the Kindle to your PC, you can download them in .txt format, which is great if you want to store, extend and elaborate more the notes in a word processor.

All in all, given the above considerations and all the necessary compromises that had to be made, I think Kindle got it right!

I only am sad that it doesn't work with PDFs (as I am a voracious PDF scientific article reader).
With such capabilities on PDFs, there would really be very few issues left (mainly PDF zoom&pan) from stopping me warmly recommending DX to all the scholars and academics (as myself) whose job or (and) pleasure is to read 10+ scientific articles per week.

And I stand by than even in this new iPad world we seem to be living in now!

Take care.