Way back in April, I bought myself a cheap, in fact the cheapest I could find at the time, tablet to use as an e-reader for public domain books from Google Books and epubs from Project Gutenberg.
Six months on I can say that the idea is a success.
There has been a bit of creep, I've been using the machine more and more tethered via my phone, rather than purely as an offline reader, and I've been using both Amazon's Kindle application and Google Play books more and more to read books rather than the pure model I envisaged originally.
That said, Lithium remains my preferred e-reader of choice for epubs from Gutenberg.
In use performance has been reasonable - good enough to read books and quickly check email and twitter, plus a couple of news sites, and battery life has been good enough, although if I was doing this over again I'd probably go for a device with longer battery life.
The 7" screen format is ideal for reading - about the size of a classic Penguin paperback - and again adequate for text on a screen, and of course the small size makes the device supremely portable, small enough to shove in a backpack or messenger bag.
In use nothing has broken the original premise that a cheap tablet is perfectly acceptable as an ereading device - my $75 device can and does do the job.
Definitely a success ...
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