You can multi-task -- you can have music playing while you surf the net, read a book or use most apps (at least the ones I currently have). In fact, I'm doing it now.
Reading books is pretty sweet -- you can add bookmarks, but I don't see how to add notes -- but there also different apps for book reading -- iPad has one, there's a kindle app as well -- may depend on what you use. I'd strongly recommend putting your hands on one and checking it out -- it isn't the ideal computing machine, but it does a nice job on the stuff is does.
Bookmarks