[ale] eBook readers for PDF reference material

[Pat Regan]

On Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:30:03 -0400
"Michael B. Trausch" <mike at trausch.us> wrote:

> I'm wondering if anyone here has purchased any one of the various
> ebook readers available for the purpose of loading reference material
> onto it, and likes it.

I have a Sony PRS-300.  I didn't get it only for reading technical
books, I got it mostly for fiction.  I like the 300.  It is a good
compromise of size, screen real estate, and battery life.  It weighs
somewhere around a quarter pound and is small enough that I can palm it.

I probably read between 100 and 200 "pages" each week.  Each page is
whatever the original document thinks a printed page is, they're
usually around 3 screens full at the font size I use.  At this rate I
have to plug it in for a charge every 3 or 4 weeks.

It has about 450 meg of usable memory and the cheap/small 300 does not
have an sd card slot.  I have about 80 books on there using up around
50 meg.

> I've been trying to figure out which one to buy for a while now.  I
> keep coming back to the Kindle DX, which seems to support the least
> number of formats, but supports PDFs (which is what I use the most)
> and has a relatively large "paper" size.  Most of the PDFs that I get
> for this are letter-sized, or almost letter sized, and while I can
> probably regenerate a perfectly sized PDF for whatever screen, I don't
> necessarily want to go to all that effort (though if that is better
> for one reason or another, I will).

The first thing I did was convert anything everything I loaded on there
into epub.  It works great for fiction, because of compression most of
my epubs are half the size of a plain ascii text file.  

They work poorly for anything technical.  There's apparently a
bug/feature in the sony epub renderer.  Long lines in a <pre> tag get
truncated on the screen.  Straight PDF files don't seem to have this
problem.

> Anyone have thoughts on this?

Yes!

So far I've been thinking along the lines of technical books along the
lines of "Learn Foobar in 42 Days" type books.  I don't know that an
e-ink display is great for using reference material.  Page turning is
quite slow.  I think the speed is fine for reading, but I wouldn't want
to flip through a document looking for something.  My little reader
does not have a keyboard for searching, either.

I would think about using a tablet of some sort for reference
material.  We have one of the cheap and slow Eken 7 inch Android
tablets.  They're a little slower than my overclocked HTC Dream was but
they have a little more free RAM so switching apps is a bit better.

There are better Android tablets now, even getting down near that $100
price tag now.  I've said before that I think the iPad is too heavy.  I
mostly think it is too heavy to use to sit around reading a novel on.

Pat