[wolf]

First, what devices does the school recommend. You don't want to buy anything that won't work with their system, but you also don't want to buy something that works with their system that sucks ... might as well stick with paper books if that's the case.

Also, what happens to the books after the semester is over? Do you get to keep them for reference, or do they disappear ... if they disappear, how much of an inconvenience will that be to you? Big? Then stick with paper books.

You might want to consider waiting for November 15, and find out if the Kindle Fire lives up to it's expectations ... you will be able to download other reading apps, possibly including the one that your school demands that you have.

Do you know what format the textsbooks are supplied in? EPUB, PDF, or some proprietary crap that you can't jailbreak to read as you like?

If the files aren't DRMed, you can convert them with Calibre and transfer them to a Kindle pretty easily. Word on the street is that the unscrupulous have ways of doing the same to a DRMed file.

As a reading device, I love the Kindle. I've gone on and on about this, actually ... and have "sold" quite a few of them ... live demonstrations are a fact of Kindle ownership ... people just walk up to you and start asking questions.

I'll let you know about the Fire, as soon as I've road tested it a bit.

Hell, get the Fire anyway ... a tablet for $200? I'm buying mine with change I found in my car ashtray. And then you can also get whatever crap tablet will do the job you need, but you'll end up hating because the interface is kludgy.

The Kindle App (and Cloud Reader) are both free ... Don't know if you could read your non-amazon purchased content on the Cloud Reader, but I know you can do it with the Kindle App, you just need to figure out where the files get stored, then send your textbook to that directory. Been there, done that on several different devices (Android, Blackberry, and PC).