eReader Owners Thread (Kindle, Nook, Kobo etc)

[AvatarIII]

It seems like a lot of people here got e-readers for Christmas, mostly kindles, but I didn't want to discriminate against other brands. this should be used as a place to discuss ereaders, compare features, and share resources, ebook suppliers and whatever.

I got a Kindle (basic), I have already put way too many books on it, quite a lot of free ebooks from Amazon, and Project Gutenburg, I also bought a few books in a 99p Christmas sale that Amazon UK did, including Christopher Hitchens' God is not Great, also it's worth checking out Amazon UK every day for their daily deal,, one book, one day, normally 99p.

[Cassi]

I got a Sony reader a few Christmases ago, and the Kindle 3G this Christmas. The Kindle is definitely a massive step up -- a lot faster (I had to hit the next button about 3/4 of the way down the page on the Sony to try to avoid waiting ages for the page turn, but obviously it's difficult to time so I'd often still have to wait or it'd turn too soon so I'd have to go back again, so an even longer wait) and being able to actually buy books right from it wherever I am instead of relying on my laptop (and then having to find the cable to transfer the books) is also a big plus.

I'm working my way through the A Song of Ice and Fire series at the moment, after getting a deal on the first one in the 12 days of Christmas thing. This is luckily making me not go overboard with buying a load of other books, which is the temptation even though it's not like the whole ereader thing is new to me...

[Narsil]

No. See Rule #2 -ST

[wst]

I've got the little Kindle, and I'm being really careful to not visit the Amazon site too often as it is so easy to buy a book without really realising it, the one-click thing is much harder than my old way of "Take out money from an ATM and go to Cambridge and search waterstones"...

I'd had a .mobi of Dracula on my computer for ages, but no way to read it, so I've been reading that (57% through it so far) and got a little backlog of books on there for afterwards (Ender's Game and Neuromancer), at which point I'll start looking to buy again.

I don't want to miss too many good 99p books though, I guess I'll have to view Amazon with supreme restraint.

(Handy excuse to take a kindle with me to work is that I can have the instruction manuals loaded onto it )

[existentialpanda]

I've had a Sony Reader for a couple of years now and quite liked it, but I got a Nook Tablet for Christmas which is so far fantastic. It just feels nice in my hand, and the backlit screen is quite nice, and I've always been a sucker for touchscreens. Also, it can handle image PDFs much better than my old one could, which is handy for my classes. In other words I love it. Very much.

(Its name is Vincent, because I set the background to Starry Night. Yes, I name things.)

I'm working my way through Ice and Fire too, actually - I started the series last spring before Game of Thrones came out, but I stalled out partway into A Storm of Swords and I'm only now getting back to it. And I have exactly no time to read now that term's started again, so it's slow going, but I am going to finish this one way or another. Because my friends will keep bugging me until I do.

[Phoenix112358]

I bought a Kindle earlier last year and it's been pretty good so far. Funnily enough, I too am also working my way through ASOIAF (re-reading it since the first time I went through I was a bit too young and didn't really get it).

One thing I am a bit disappointed about is the UI for the Kindle 3G and how you can't really organize your eBooks and/or pdfs on it. It makes it harder for me to keep multiple series on it to switch between at my liking, since the most recently opened files will rise to the top and everything becomes out of order. Am I being silly and the organisation is actually really easy and I'm just missing it?

[Ended]

One thing I am a bit disappointed about is the UI for the Kindle 3G and how you can't really organize your eBooks and/or pdfs on it. It makes it harder for me to keep multiple series on it to switch between at my liking, since the most recently opened files will rise to the top and everything becomes out of order. Am I being silly and the organisation is actually really easy and I'm just missing it?

You might know this already, but you can make folders (the kindle calls them 'collections') for related books. On the main main menu, go to a book and press the right key, then 'Add to Collection'. You can also sort the home screen by title or author (press up then right at the main menu).

[Fedechiar]

You can also put the same book in more than one collection (might be a bonus for some, although I don't use it because I like my fetishes separed from my reading )

[maybeagnostic]

Collections are a pretty inadequate way to organize books though. At this points I have over a hundred books on my kindle and until recently I hadn't organized them at all. It wasn't much of a problem at first because generally I read a series in order and the standard 'last opened' view kept them decently organized. Over time, however, I would open an older book to look something up or show it to a friend and all my books ended up jumbled so I was forced to try out collections; now I have a first page filled with collection and I always have to scroll to the second page or open a collection before i can open whatever I am looking for. Even some of my collections have several pages and there is no way to make a collection within a collection.

I find it especially annoying that collections are either always on top (in 'last opened' view) even if they haven't been modified in a long time, or they don't actually contain books (in all other views) so I still end up with 30ish pages of books.

So organizing books on the kindle is a nightmare.

[LaserGuy]

I got a Kobo Touch for Christmas.

I'm reasonably satisfied with it. It's quick, although the touch screen responsiveness can be a bit finnicky sometimes. It's a good size, fitting nicely into one hand or my coat pocket. Text is clear and easy to read. I wish it had a better way to organize your library, since right now it just dumps all the books into one directory and lets you only sort in a few different ways (author/title/last read). Fine for everyday purposes, I guess, not so great when I want to put 100+ scientific papers on it.

I haven't used the bookstore too much on it yet, since I still have a fairly significant number of ebooks to read that I used to read off of my laptop before I got the Kobo. The web browser is very slow and basically useless at this point, however. The bookstore is rather quick...

[dubsola]

So organizing books on the kindle is a nightmare.

I agree with this.

I also can't help but feel that kindle books could be a bit cheaper. They cost about the same price as a physical book, or maybe 10% cheaper at best. It's turning me off impulse buys.

[Fedechiar]

I find it especially annoying that collections are either always on top (in 'last opened' view) even if they haven't been modified in a long time, or they don't actually contain books (in all other views) so I still end up with 30ish pages of books.

So organizing books on the kindle is a nightmare.

You can choose to sort them by author...Although I agree that they might have put in a little more effort in sorting the books in a way that isn't a major pain in the neck, it wouldn't even have been that hard to program

[fizzgig]

I've got the little Kindle, and I'm being really careful to not visit the Amazon site too often as it is so easy to buy a book without really realising it, the one-click thing is much harder than my old way of "Take out money from an ATM and go to Cambridge and search waterstones"...

I'd had a .mobi of Dracula on my computer for ages, but no way to read it, so I've been reading that (57% through it so far) and got a little backlog of books on there for afterwards (Ender's Game and Neuromancer), at which point I'll start looking to buy again.

I don't want to miss too many good 99p books though, I guess I'll have to view Amazon with supreme restraint.

(Handy excuse to take a kindle with me to work is that I can have the instruction manuals loaded onto it )

You could always just turn off One-Click buying? It's an option in your account settings somewhere. There's also always the option to return the book if you bought it by accident - I think it comes up on the confirmation screen after you buy something.

[Zamfir]

So organizing books on the kindle is a nightmare.

I agree with this.

I also can't help but feel that kindle books could be a bit cheaper. They cost about the same price as a physical book, or maybe 10% cheaper at best. It's turning me off impulse buys.

When ebooks were starting to get big, Sf author Charlie Stross wrote a series of articles to describe how publishing a book goes, with an eye and what might change and what might stay the same with ebooks.

This post in particular is very insightful. You'll see that many costs just won't be going away, at best they can be shifted onto the authors (who might not be good editors and proofreaders, let alone marketeers)

Towards the end:

After I hand in an MS, I expect to do another 3-6 weeks' solid work on the book before it is published — mostly in the CEM-checking and page proof-checking stages. After I hand in the MS, I expect my publisher to put in ... well, Tor produce 300 books a year with 60 staff, so it's about ten person-weeks per book in house, but this doesn't include the external copy editor, proofreader, typesetter, printer, and other outsourced tasks, which probably double it again. Overall, the process of turning a manuscript into a book is estimated to cost $7000-$20,000 — an amount comparable to the author's likely earnings from the book. In fact, the actual division of labour on a book is split roughly 50/50 between the author and the publisher.

Keep in mind that many books sell in the thousands over their lifetime, with low ten thousands already pretty good. I once read that you need about 20 sales/week to make it into the Amazon top 10,000, and Amazon counts for a significant share of all book sales.

Including Amazon's cut and taxes plus the uncertainty, and even an ebook-only book can't be too cheap. By my esitmates, omewhere in the 5 to 10 dollar range at the low end (or more, depending on typical sales for the target niche), if an author wants to be able to live off writing and publishers want to be able to risk introducing new authors.

At the moment, publishers bear the fixed costs of both paper books and ebooks, and they are hesitant about going ebook-only (since that might well be the equivalent of giving a noose to Amazon, with a "pull me" sign on it). Put it all together, and drastically lower prices than mass-market paperbacks are not that realistic at the moment. We'll have to see how the market develops towards the future.

EDIT: apologies on the mild necroing, I didn't watch the dates properly

[Black Dynamite]

So organizing books on the kindle is a nightmare.

I agree with this.

I also can't help but feel that kindle books could be a bit cheaper. They cost about the same price as a physical book, or maybe 10% cheaper at best. It's turning me off impulse buys.

I completely agree with the organization issue. But my solution has been to only keep a handful of books loaded on it at a time. The rest are meticulously organized in folders on my laptop.

Also, I feel like books bought from the Amazon store are outrageously overpriced. For the most part, all you're buying is a text file (oh, and I guess you're buying all the hard work the author put into writing it, all the editing, and the whole always-being-available-for-download-at-any-time thing), and you're paying full price for it. When, depending on the book (old and used), it is easy to get a 'like new' physical copy for 80% off the cover price. If they want to push e-readers so much, I wish they would offer the benefit of lower priced books.

Edit: My argument doesn't seem as valid as it did when I wrote it. Eh.

[Drumheller769]

No, I think it is a valid argument. There really isn't that much reason to have an eBook be the same price as a paperback book. I understand there are a decent amount of production costs to an eBook, but they are one time costs. I see eBooks by my favorite authors that are 1$ more than the paper back copy in a store, its dumb.

[Zamfir]

The problem is this part:

If they want to push e-readers so much, I wish they would offer the benefit of lower priced books.

Most people in the book business don't want to push ereaders too much. Amazon pushes them, because Amazon is an excellent position to become the single dominant distributer of ebooks in the world. But for nearly everybody else that's a big risk of ebooks, not an advantage, And people worry about other things, like piracy.

They have to go along anyway, but a lot of people (both publshers and writers) would be happier if it went slower. They would have more time to see how it develops, to change their practices, build defenses against problems like piracy and Amazon's dominance. So they try a balancing act: provide ebooks because they don't want to lose readers, but keep paper book readers happy as long as it lasts.

[AvatarIII]

So organizing books on the kindle is a nightmare.

I agree with this.

I also can't help but feel that kindle books could be a bit cheaper. They cost about the same price as a physical book, or maybe 10% cheaper at best. It's turning me off impulse buys.

I completely agree with the organization issue. But my solution has been to only keep a handful of books loaded on it at a time. The rest are meticulously organized in folders on my laptop.

Also, I feel like books bought from the Amazon store are outrageously overpriced. For the most part, all you're buying is a text file (oh, and I guess you're buying all the hard work the author put into writing it, all the editing, and the whole always-being-available-for-download-at-any-time thing), and you're paying full price for it. When, depending on the book (old and used), it is easy to get a 'like new' physical copy for 80% off the cover price. If they want to push e-readers so much, I wish they would offer the benefit of lower priced books.

Edit: My argument doesn't seem as valid as it did when I wrote it. Eh.

I got around the problem of organization on my kindle by using the collections feature, having about 1 page of collections (by author), and each collection has less than a page of book in it.

as for the price thing, I totally agree, unfortunately in the UK there are rules about what is and isn't taxed with VAT, books are not taxed, however ebooks are taxed at 20%, I doubt the cost of manufacture is more than 20% of the cost of a book, therefore if a publisher sells books to Amazon for example, therefore, unless the publisher accepts lower income on ebooks per book sold, the cost of an ebook will be: cost of book - cost of manufacture + 20% possibly even plus some sort of fee that ebook companies charge for stocking it on their sites. I don't know.

I personally think that ebooks (and indeed all digital media) should be exempt from VAT but that will never happen.

[lanicita]

I have a Nook Tablet, which I adore. I'm really glad I got that instead of the Kindle, because I'm wary of the Amazon-taking-over-the-world-of-ebooks thing. I wouldn't have minded the regular Nook, but I do like having the backlit screen and all the other advantages of a tablet (small and lightweight, long battery life, apps, touchscreen) without having to spring for something like an iPad. And since I have a nice laptop already I had little real need for a tablet, but having something that is primarily built as an eReader means I do use it mostly for reading.

While I would love to have cheap ebooks, and while they technically don't cost nearly as much to the publishers as paper books do, I absolutely understand why they are so expensive. They are new enough that publishers aren't going to know for a while how many physical books to print if the ebook price is very low, so keeping it high means they can take their time figuring that out and gradually lower it in time. Personally, I prefer to own physical books anyway, so right now I see buying ebooks as a luxury. It's my own problem if I want to buy an ebook instead of/in addition to a physical book, so I will damn well come up with the money myself. The one thing I would like to see soon is a discount for buying the ebook plus the physical copy. For example, Ken Follett's Fall of Giants, which is a 1000+ page book, has been big news because the ebook is more expensive than the hardcover. I own two of his other books in paperback, and I adore them. I would love to buy the book but I hated lugging around the other ones since they're so huge. I've put off buying the book so far because I'm hoping that in time, they'll offer some kind of deal so I can buy both, and have the physical copy but be able to read it on my Nook.

Anyway, so far I haven't bought a single book for my Nook. I've downloaded a lot off Project Gutenberg, I've taken out one or two from my library, and if I end up having any textbooks that are cheaper on the Nook than they are used I'll buy those, but as I said, it's a luxury. Right now I'm in school so I barely have time to read for pleasure anyway, but when I do I expect I'll keep doing what I do now: buy and read physical books, and only use my Nook for free books or exceptionally large ones. I prefer physical books because I like to dog-ear pages with my favorite passages, I like the feel of them, and there is no danger of losing them due to copyright issues or other problems unforeseen.

[Zamfir]

Have you tried using an e-ink reader for a while? I've personally found eink readers more pleasant than regular books, which in turn are more pleasant than tablet-style readers. I now prefer to buy a book in digital format, though I share the worry about Amazon.

The e-ink itself matters, but weight is another advantage. The machine is light enough to hold in one hand without becoming uncomfortable over time, especially since you don't have to switch pages. I've found lcd-tablets still a bit too heavy for that. And the lower price makes me more relaxed in lugging it around, without much worries about theft or damage.

Completely subjective of course, but I was surprised how easily the kindle replaced physical books for me, in a way that an LCD tablet doesn't.

[maybeagnostic]

I second Zamfir's recommendation about trying out an e-ink reader. My kindle instantly replaced physical books for me. I initially got it because I tend to move every 6-12 months and moving physical books is very difficult and expensive but I found that withing a few days of having it I was more comfortable with reading it than physical books. I do miss browsing in bookstores though. I still go every once in a while but I feel bad when I spend a few hours looking around and leave without buying anything. I really wish there was a system for buying digital books from physical bookstores, preferably one where a digital copy goes with the physical copy of each book so I can have and look at the book (if I want to have the physical copy) but still read it on my reader.

If you want to avoid amazon, the other current generation readers are no worse than the kindle. I tried out a friend's sony reader and I think I like it better than the kindle touch.

[natraj]

i accidentally got a nook (the small e-ink one, not the color or the tablet) on Friday because i could not decide on a book to buy so i panicked and bought ALL THE BOOKS.

okay, not all the books. just a medium with which to read them. even though it was a purchase i didn't plan on i am loving it a lot. i am having to resist just buying lots of books for it.

[AvatarIII]

I second Zamfir's recommendation about trying out an e-ink reader. My kindle instantly replaced physical books for me. I initially got it because I tend to move every 6-12 months and moving physical books is very difficult and expensive but I found that withing a few days of having it I was more comfortable with reading it than physical books. I do miss browsing in bookstores though. I still go every once in a while but I feel bad when I spend a few hours looking around and leave without buying anything. I really wish there was a system for buying digital books from physical bookstores, preferably one where a digital copy goes with the physical copy of each book so I can have and look at the book (if I want to have the physical copy) but still read it on my reader.

If you want to avoid amazon, the other current generation readers are no worse than the kindle. I tried out a friend's sony reader and I think I like it better than the kindle touch.

I totally agree, DVDs come with digital copies, why not books?

An interesting question would be, is it morally objectionable to download an ebook illegally if you already own the physical copy?

[Rez Delnava]

As a Nook Touch owner, I highly recommend rooting the device back into the pseudo-tablet it started life as before B&N locked the Android firmware. The refresh rate of the screen is fast enough to make web browsing feel capable, and even a fair number of apps work. Being able to customize the hardware buttons has been a real gift, too. And swapping the orientation... I didn't even know I needed this feature until I rooted my Nook and set it up; some things are just easier to read in landscape orientation.

As a frequent lurker (first day-poster) I have to say I'm a little bit astonished of how many people responded with 'Kindle" in the poll. The closed source .azn format does not adhere at all to the usual 'open source/proliferation of information' ethos seen elsewhere on these boards. The .EPUB format should be the clear winner in the e-books market, yet as others have mentioned, Amazon's .azn is set to have a stranglehold on the digital publication world.

There's also Amazon's objectionable habit of tracking everything you read. As a Library employee, this is a huge red-flag for me personally--imagine if a court subpoenaed that data... *shudders*


As for the moral/legal issue of 'obtaining' a digital copy of a physical book you already own... there's two sides of it. In one case, the official digital version may have a new ISBN in which case it is legally a new work and by law getting a pirated copy would be 'theft'; on the other hand, copyright law allows for personal use copies/facsimiles of published work that you own a copy of and 'archival copies' of data/software--in this case one might be able to argue that the copyrighted work is the text as data (not the whole of the dead-tree volume) and the pirated copy is an archival facsimile. Copyright law (at least here in the USA, and as far as I can understand it--since I'm no lawyer or legal adviser) is a fickle demon when it comes to new technology. And as anyone who has paid attention to the Google Books Digital Library lawsuits can tell you, the judge is still out on the subject.

I would never do it myself since the book as a physical object has a different sensory experience from the digital, making the two separable enough morally.

[Hawknc]

The reason I went for the Kindle was primarily the hardware - nothing else locally matched it for speed, contrast, form and function. Of course, I then immediately turned off the wireless, jailbroke it and started loading mobis on, but plenty of people don't want to do that - they just want to buy books and read them. Amazon's nailed that formula, which is no small part of why they're the market leader. Apple resoundingly demonstrated that the market doesn't value openness nearly as much as it values convenience.

[AvatarIII]

The reason I went for the Kindle was primarily the hardware - nothing else locally matched it for speed, contrast, form and function. Of course, I then immediately turned off the wireless, jailbroke it and started loading mobis on, but plenty of people don't want to do that - they just want to buy books and read them. Amazon's nailed that formula, which is no small part of why they're the market leader. Apple resoundingly demonstrated that the market doesn't value openness nearly as much as it values convenience.

does it need "jailbreaking" to load non amazon bought mobis? or do you just mean figuratively? because i've put plenty of non amazon mobis on mine with no trouble.

[Zamfir]

As a frequent lurker (first day-poster) I have to say I'm a little bit astonished of how many people responded with 'Kindle" in the poll. The closed source .azn format does not adhere at all to the usual 'open source/proliferation of information' ethos seen elsewhere on these boards. The .EPUB format should be the clear winner in the e-books market, yet as others have mentioned, Amazon's .azn is set to have a stranglehold on the digital publication world.

I guess that principled nothing-but-open people are a minority, even among those who are largely supportive of the idea.

When i bought the device, there was no question of competition. The Kindle 3 was both the cheapest device for sale, and either the best or very close to the best. It's hard to compete with subsidies. For the rest, I find that Amazon's ebook shopping and delivery system works very well, and their range of books for sale and prices are also good. At least, after I used a proxy server to tell them I lived in the US.

Stripping the DRM from ebooks is fairly easy, so I am comfortable that I can keep the books I bought no matter what Amazon does in the future, or if I want to migrate to another platform. And in the other direction, it's easy to convert other formats to something Kindle-readable. Those things mattered to me, and I would not have bought the machine otherwise.

There are many people for whom those steps are still a bit too tricky, and there's indeed a good possibility that they become locked-in to Amazon. I don't really know what I can personally do about that, except help people around me if they bump into that problem. Yeah, I worry about their potential market dominance, but not buying their device doesn't change that. Whether we like it or not, the united linux lovers of the world are just not a large enough of a group to change market patterns in the consumer sphere.

I don't really get the worry about privacy. If I buy physical books from amazon, they also have my reading habits on file. If people have reading habits that they want to keep seriously secret (which I can indeed imagine), then they should probably use a different device. It would be worrisome if such devices didn't exist at all or where outrageously expensiv), but that's luckily not the case.

Of course, I then immediately turned off the wireless, jailbroke it and started loading mobis on, but plenty of people don't want to do that - they just want to buy books and read them.

What kindle do you have, and how did you do the jailbreaking? I tried it on mine in order to have different screensaver pictures, but various attempts didn't work. No bricking either, just no effects.

[dubsola]

EDIT: apologies on the mild necroing, I didn't watch the dates properly

Not at all, that was a good post. Along with the VAT increase I can totally see why they're priced the way they are.

[Hawknc]

The reason I went for the Kindle was primarily the hardware - nothing else locally matched it for speed, contrast, form and function. Of course, I then immediately turned off the wireless, jailbroke it and started loading mobis on, but plenty of people don't want to do that - they just want to buy books and read them. Amazon's nailed that formula, which is no small part of why they're the market leader. Apple resoundingly demonstrated that the market doesn't value openness nearly as much as it values convenience.

does it need "jailbreaking" to load non amazon bought mobis? or do you just mean figuratively? because i've put plenty of non amazon mobis on mine with no trouble.

As Zamfir implied, it's really just to be able to customise it.

What kindle do you have, and how did you do the jailbreaking? I tried it on mine in order to have different screensaver pictures, but various attempts didn't work. No bricking either, just no effects.

Um. The older white one? I can't even remember the exact generation now, it was the 3G version. From memory I used this tutorial.

[Zamfir]

Mm, i tried pretty much the same.

[Cassi]

Well I am now on Kindle number three. Kindle number two came just a couple weeks after Christmas, when Kindle number one decided it was fun to restart itself every few minutes. On Friday, when I turned Kindle number two on, the screen became covered in lines, which only got worse every time I restarted it. So time to see how Kindle number three fares...

[IcedT]

I've got one of the older e-Ink Nooks and I've really enjoyed it. It's more convenient than just carrying 50 books everywhere but it doesn't feel like a toy or a laptop like some of the newer Nooks and Kindles do. I've also been enjoying all the strange and wonderful public domain books I can get for it- I spent my summer vacation reading a German infantry manual from just before World War 1.

[AvatarIII]

EDIT: apologies on the mild necroing, I didn't watch the dates properly

Not at all, that was a good post. Along with the VAT increase I can totally see why they're priced the way they are.

I'm not sure i want to live in a world where posting after less than a week of inactivity = necroing

it doesn't feel like a toy or a laptop like some of the newer Nooks and Kindles do.

My kindle really doesn't feel like a toy at all, it has a very solid build quality, and it's made of metal, I'd hardly call that toy-like, or laptop-like

Well I am now on Kindle number three. Kindle number two came just a couple weeks after Christmas, when Kindle number one decided it was fun to restart itself every few minutes. On Friday, when I turned Kindle number two on, the screen became covered in lines, which only got worse every time I restarted it. So time to see how Kindle number three fares...

ouch, that sucks. i got mine just before Christmas and haven't had any problems yet, using it almost every day, and often falling asleep with it and dropping it on the floor. I do have it in a protective case though.

[Angua]

How good are eReaders for reading pdfs like from academic journals? Do any of them do colour? Is it easy to make notes on them?

[AvatarIII]

How good are eReaders for reading pdfs like from academic journals? Do any of them do colour? Is it easy to make notes on them?

I think there is only one colour ereader on the market, but there are rumours there will be a lot more being released very soon.
I can only speak for the Kindle 4 I have, but it can read pdfs, but the 6" screen is simply not big enough to show an entire page of a PDF without the writing being way too small, you can zoom in, but then you have to scroll too much, and the refresh rate on eink screens is simply not good enough for that to be practical. since it has no keyboard I have never tried making notes, so I cannot comment on that.

if you wanted a kindle for that purpose, i think you would have to get the rather expensive Kindle DX, with it's 9.7" screen. I'm not sure if there is another eink reader with a comparable screen size though.

[Angua]

Thanks - I thought it was worth thinking about.

[maybeagnostic]

How good are eReaders for reading pdfs like from academic journals? Do any of them do colour? Is it easy to make notes on them?

I originally bought the first kindle DX with the intention of reading papers and textbooks on it but it never really felt comfortable enough. 9.7" is a bit too small so the page ends up looking cramped and unpleasant to read. Landscape view made the text and graphs the right size but it didn't mesh well with the two-column setup of academic literature (had to go forward-back-forward-froward to read a whole page) and graphs/tables sometimes got split between pages. Also I tend to flip between pages on textbooks a lot (often reading a few things several pages apart simultaneously) and the kindle isn't really suited to that. It has bookmarks that let you jump to specific spots but it's more cumbersome than flipping physical pages.

A friend has a sony reader with a small screen that solves the problem much better by letting you split the screen in 4 or 6 parts like this:

Code: Select all

1 3     1 4
2 4     2 5
        3 6

Makes reading papers much more convenient but still runs into trouble with large pdfs so whole textbooks take a while to open. Some other readers might have a similar functionality but none of the kindles do. In fact the kindle touch doesn't even have landscape view so it's completely useless for reading pdfs.

You can highlight text and make notes on regular books. Highlighting is very convenient but writing notes by hand is probably faster than using a reader keyboard. Whether you can do it on pdfs is another question. You should be able to use it on OCRed pdfs or ones generated with LaTeX so it should be possible to highlight academic pdfs but that might depend on the reader. Any pdfs that are 'just pictures' (including text that hasn't been OCRed) can't be highlighted.

[Zamfir]

I was also wondering about pdf reading, and concluded that an 10 inch LCD tablet works best. My 6-inch kindle is simply too small (unless I convert a text-only pdf to mobi format). I played around briefly with a 9.7 inch kindle, but it's still too small to read most pdfs one full page at a time. And scrolling and zooming is uncomfortable.

A 10-inch tablet works better: you get color, scrolling and zooming, more processing power to handle large pdfs. And 9.7 inch eink readers are nearly as expensive. But I am still waiting for the prices on tablets to fall a bit more. And I am not sure that I would be much happier reading pdfs on a tablet than simply reading them on a computer screen.

[pseudoidiot]

I've loaded lots of pdf's on my Kindle and their readability has varied quite a bit. Some of them are perfect in normal orientation, some are perfect landscape. Some need to be zoomed in a bit, which is kind of a pain. Some of them were originally color (with artwork and such) that still look okay rendered in black & white on the Kindle and others don't work out so well.

I think it's mostly luck, really, as I doubt anyone is formatting pdf's for e-readers just yet. I definitely wouldn't rely on my Kindle for reading pdf's. It's a nice feature to have, though, I just don't count on it working well all the time.

[Angua]

I was thinking about it as I read through a lot of papers (though next year the numbers of papers should go down, so maybe'll I'll just suffer through it) and my eyes are not feeling happy about this today. However, I guess I just have to make it until May with reading papers, so it's probably not really that worth it.