If you are going to read Pale Fire, get it on paper. I tried to read it on my Kindle and the UI is not up to task of lots of flipping back and forth between the poem and the prose sections.
They do take up a shitload less space, which is a pretty big advantage, though.
The e-reader UI is generally so much better than paper, if a book is not available for kindle, I'll usually find something else to read. Pale Fire is a special case book where you want two have bookmarks where you are currently working. I read Chuck Palahniuk's Diary on paper, and an e-reader would definitely have ruined it.
Technical books with a lot of charts, diagrams, monospaced code examples, etc can highlight the weaknesses of e-readers. PDFs are almost always better on a tablet.
But for like, words-in-a-row novels that don't mind being re-wrapped, there is no comparison, for me. e-Reader every time.
Which is 98% of novels. e-Readers are even great for books with lots of end notes or foot notes. It's great for flipping between those. I had no problem reading Infinite Jest, for example.
I guess if my copy of Pale Fire had hyperlinked all the poem line mentions, I would have been fine. :)
Now I'm wondering if I could write a quick script to annotate mine thusly...
* Control of text size * Weight
I forget what it was, but at some point I was excitedly reading a new hardback -- and found it so heavy to read in bed that I bought the Kindle edition in addition to the paper one. This also applies for travel, doubly so.
I'm the kind of reader that goes back and forth when reading a novel. I like to go back and re-read when a character was introduced, or simply go back a few pages.
The UI of the Kindle sucks for this. It excels at finding a specific sentence, of course, but not for the kind of flipping pages I enjoy doing.
I read both on paper, using two bookmarks.
What people who adopted e-readers often say is that e-readers can be more convenient and take less space.
But nobody says "paper sucks".
When you mix in the weight and the other issues with paper, it's not just inconvenient.
I'm happy to say that compared to eReaders, paper sucks. I just don't buy paper copies any more -- and I can access any new ebook in my library from any vacation hammock.