This article on Wired.com has the latest market research data from ChangeWave on e-book reader market shares. It shows iPad gaining rapidly on Kindle. If you extrapolate the data, which is always tricky, they cross with about 40 percent of the market each around March 2011. Everyone else combined splits the remaining 20. When it comes to purchase intentions, iPad is already well ahead.

The article goes on to point out that Amazon gets revenue from iPad readers, since they buy books from Amazon, but that this will decline over time as more iPad users migrate to Apple book channels.

I have both the Kindle and the Nook. I highly prefer the Kindle's user interface but the Nook wins on the ePub format. For me, as others have said, the ability to check out books from the local library is huge. I can read up to 3 or 4 books a week and buying books was getting expensive. I relied heavily on the library when I was reading hard books.

I haven't ventured out from my local library (Las Vegas actually has a good library) but for anyone looking for a more extensive ebook collection, the Free Library of Philadelphia evidently has a good collection and it costs only $15 per year for non-residents to join. To review their collection:
http://freelibrary.lib.overdrive.com...en/Default.htm

To get the card, you must mail in the form with payment: http://libwww.freelibrary.org/register/getcard1.cfm

Here's a hint, try to get the ePub version rather than the .pdf format, if possible. It formats more clearly.

Just something to be aware of is that most libraries have wait lists for many ebook titles. You can easily wait up to a month. The library is not something you can rely on for instant gratification.

I think this is flawed in a number of ways, the most obvious being that the iPad is not, first and foremost, an ebook reader. It's a tablet computer that has ebook reading capabilities along with a thousand other things. If that's what you want (and you want to hold up a device that weighs twice as much as a Kindle while reading and has 1/10 of the battery life), then great. But the focus of the iPad is not book reading, and that survey doesn't ask how many books iPad users are buying from iBooks as opposed to how many books Kindle users buy from Amazon. I'd bet they are nowhere close.

As long as Amazon continues to sell Kindle books, the platform will do just fine. Amazon can sell books on the iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Android, PC, Mac, and something I'm sure I've left out. The iBooks store sells on Apple platforms only. And Amazon sells more books to Kindle owners than Apple does to its device owners, because Kindle owners own the Kindle to read books and that's really it.

ETA: Here's a great analysis of why the analysis of the ChangeWave data is flawed.

Absolutely. Also, unlike buying a book from B&N or Amazon over wifi or 3G, you must connect your device to your computer and download it manually. There may be other ways, but the only way I know, requires installation of Adobe Digital Editions and then download thru to your device. It definitely requires some work.

If someone can suggest an alternative, that would be great!

That's very interesting. I hadn't considered this, but I just checked my own library and found that some more popular books (eg, the Larsson Stieg Millenium series) has pretty long waitlists. For example, The Girl Who Played With Fire has 14 library ebook copies available with a wait list of 35. This is in contrast to the actual book, of which there are 11 copies and 16 people on the wait list. Of course, if the book doesn't have a wait list, instant gratification.