Here's a message I posted about this on another list:

I recently bought a refurbished ipad mini.  Here's why I like it over my
Booksense standard.  It has two speakers and they have more volume and sound
better than the speakers in the booksense.  With the following apps,it does
everything I've been doing with the booksense.

With the bard mobile app, I can read nls books on it.  Books can be directly
downloaded to the ipad mini.
With the audible app, I can read books from audible.  Books can be directly
downloaded to the ipad mini.
With the Kindle app, I can read Kindle books from Amazon.
With voice dream reader, I can read books from bookshare,  unprotected epub
and other file types.  I use it to read multi-part mp3 audio books.
What's nice about voice dream reader, you can download books from both 
bookshare
and Project Gutenberg directly to the ipad mini.  I bought the optional
neospeech voice to make it sound just like a booksense when reading any text
based file.  Voice dream reader is supplied with Acapela.  I
can switch between Acapela and neospeech.
With the downcast app, I can download podcasts directly to the ipad mini.  I
can subscribe and unsubscribe to podcasts right on it.