Amazon Kindle Touch (with Special Offers, Wi-Fi)

Pros: Intuitive interface; bests Adobe with great searching, sorting, bookmark, highlight, copy, export, read text and background change options, Amazon cloud storage, cheaper prices for same book, quick customer service.

Cons: * Changing computers with same book loses highlights, bookmarks, etc. but not your last page read.

* Maps, Illustrations, special-font languages like Greek and Hebrew might not be supported in a book. Varies by book.

Summary: This review is on Kindle for PC free app downloadable from Amazon. I don't like separate readers, as that's one more piece of hardware to use, and frankly the display is too small for my taste. But instead, I can get hundreds of books and read them on any number of my PCs, by downloading the software. Which is, what I've done.

Been using it for about a month, and am generally thrilled. Limitations are as specified in the cons listed above; which you can appreciate, since the product is relatively new on the market.

Changes the way I want to read books. Period.

Pros in more detail:

1. Better than Adobe at searching; you get a left frame which displays your search string IN CONTEXT so you can scroll down quickly and find what you sought.

2. Allows you to change colors of the background to sepia or black, which lessens glare.

3. Allows you to PRECISELY resize the font to what you find comfortable to read, on the fly.

4. Keeps the true page number of the hardback (Adobe doesn't do that), so whatever page you're in Kindle, is the same page in the hardback.

5. All your Kindle books remain in the Amazon cloud, so you can download them at will on as many PCs/MACs as you desire. If you're online when reading, your latest place is marked, so you can pick up where you left off, if you're on the same machine.

6. Cost of a Kindle book is generally (not always) cheaper than the hardback. Many of the 19th century or other books are free. Many are free to RENT -- that's right, you can RENT books. And, they have a lending library, too. I mean BIG stuff like the collected works of Shakespeare, all the Latin Classics, tons of stuff which are harder to read in hardback or online (i.e., in Google books).

7. You can highlight, bookmark, copy and export from a book, into your word processor; Kindle automatically inserts a citation. Not only is this needed for copyright protection, but it's a boon if you're writing a paper or otherwise quoting a book.

8. Quick customer service. There's a built-in 'feedback' option so you can quickly send feedback without having to go through email, if you're online when you're sending the feedback.

9. You can sort your books by Title, Author, Date downloaded.

10. Generally intuitive interface.

11. If you downloaded a book but don't like it, refunds are instantaneous (use Manage My Kindle in your Amazon account).

There are more pros, but this should suffice.

Cons in detail:

1. If you change computers and read the same book, you lose your highlights, bookmarks, etc. but not your last page read. So that means the highlights and bookmarks are stored on the computer you used for reading, not in the cloud. Not sure this is the problem, but it happened to me when I switched machines while reading the same book.

2. Maps, Illustrations, special-font languages like Greek and Hebrew might not be supported in a book. Varies by book. In short, you're reading a transcription of a book, not the original. For example, in Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire', you can't see the Greek text in his footnotes, but instead '[GREEK TEXT]' is what shows.

3. There's an annoying gray popup used for the options, when you right-click, but the options are generally good.

4. They autoload a dictionary (which you get for free), and that interferes with reading when you select text, preparatory to highlighting it. When you remove the dictionary to stop it from auto-invoking, sometimes Kindle reports an error. But its report doesn't stop you from using the program.

There might be more cons, but I can't think of any right now.

Updated on Jul 13, 2012

UPDATE to #1 con: yeah, that's what happened. It didn't store on my machine. I was reading one book on this machine and had made many highlights and bookmarks. Then the machine crashed. When I went to read on another machine, nothing was preserved. But when this machine came back repaired, even though I had the same files on the machine, my highlights and bookmarks were GONE.

So don't read the same book on another machine.