This is why I prefer reading on the iPad or a laptop as opposed to a Kindle. While a Kindle is certainly easier on the eyes, being able to quickly flip through pages and search through a book is just too great to give up.

The big problem with LCD screens is that they give some people headaches. I can't do any serious reading on one. The attendant battery life problems are also a pretty serious issue.

Is it? I never found myself wanting for such an ability. For me, the e-ink display is much more interesting than dynamic scrolling/skimming.

Some examples of how an iPad/PDF saves me time vs a Kindle:

-Let's say I'm looking up how control flow works in a programming language I have little experience with. I can skip to the index, find control flow, and click on that in a few seconds.

-The current chapter covers a new technique that I think could be applied to a previous example, and I want to check that example out. With the iPad/PDF I can easily move back and forth, with a Kindle I can't.

-The current page references a technique from a few pages ago where I don't remember the exact details. I can easily scroll back and forth with an iPad, not so much with a Kindle.

-I want to see if a book covers a relatively obscure topic. The iPad or my computer let me do a search through a PDF for keywords and preview each section containing the keyword, a Kindle doesn't.

I expect the OP was talking about reading fiction books. You don't skim fiction.

I too like reading on iPad more then kindles, but iPad is unfortunately not very fast either. Opening an interactive ebook (the ones they introduced last month) on my iPad 2 takes about 2 seconds...

But if I repeatedly press "next page", my Kindle doesn't do a full refresh on each turn. It's actually redraws the pages quickly enough to be skimmable.