I have a kindle fire, using it this minute. If I had it to do over, I would buy an ipad. I like to scan and keep patterns as PDFs and the kindle system is not great for that. It also does not make it easy to download documents (patterns and such) from websites.
For reading the kindle fire with the swipe to move pagez is great. I also love to watch movies on it, but both of these are on ipad as well. I got this cheap though when it first came out, something that will not happen with an ipad.