

What Tool Do You Use For Reading Technical Ebooks? - lazarus
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/q/12540/5511

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drats
Over the past few months the O'Reilly ebook deal of the day at $10 (although
they seem to be testing the water for selling at over $10 at the moment
unfortunately) has lead to quite a few acquisitions on my part. Additionally
you can register your paper books and "upgrade" to an ebook for $5 on those.
All this made a Kindle 3 logical as it brought a vast number of $10 ebooks
into parity with their $30 to $40 paper cousins. My points of warning would be
as follows - this is specific as the O'Reilly books are not DRMed. You get
them in mobi, pdf, apk, daisy and epub. That said, the smaller Kindle I have
is almost completely useless for PDFs, don't even think about it, not sure
about the big Kindle though. I've had success converting webpages to .mobi
plus all the public domain stuff in txt works just fine.

<http://twitter.com/Oreillymedia> has the deals but
<http://twitter.com/timoreilly> retweets them and is vastly more interesting
to follow.

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jonhendry
Most PDFs are a little small on the DX, as well. It depends on the file, of
course.

I have the 1st gen DX. The latest DX might be better, if it has the PDF
contrast control that the kindle 3 has. The latest DX also has a better-
contrast e-ink screen.

You can always turn the DX sideways, of course. Which solves the text size
problem at the cost of having pages spread across three screenfulls.

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iuguy
For text heavy books I use a Sony PRS-300 eReader. The e-ink is much better
for eye strain and the PRS-300 does a fairly good job with PDFs as well as
EPUB formats. If I want to copy text I have whatever's on my Sony on the
laptop I sync it from so can quickly open it up there but with the reader it's
not taking up screen real estate and I can have a bunch of books on there. I
can put my annotations on Evernote if I want to.

I also use iBooks on my iPhone and can sync my books to that too, it's nowhere
near as good to read on but on a croweded train it's the best given the space
available.

For particularly graphics heavy docs, or where colour is important I use my
laptop and Foxit PDF or Calibre. This is my last choice.

My favourite by far is the Sony.

~~~
logicalmike
PRS-505 here. You don't find the 5" screen too small? For books with proper
zoom text re-formatting, not an issue at all. But otherwise, I find myself
complaining even with the larger screen.

~~~
iuguy
The zoom on the 300's really good for epub, not so hot for PDF. I tend to find
with PDFs that it's hit and miss as to the formatting, but PDFs that are
effectively scanned images are pretty much off because of the size.

I find the screen size (roughly the size of a paperback) is fine for Epubs
though, which is what I mainly use for tech books. I also like the fact that
it fits in the pockets for my shorts. This summer I went to an Island in the
mediterranean and went through about 10 books in 4 days on the thing. Carrying
the 10 books would've meant less room for luggage. Being able to take 200-odd
books to the beach is pretty awesome.

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zdw
Depends on the format.

PDF on the desktop. Keeps formatting, and on Mac Preview is solid document
viewer.

ePub on iPad/iPhone. Why not PDF on those devices? You can't
annotate/highlight PDF's but you can to ePub.

That's what works for me. YMMV.

~~~
evgen
Go get GoodReader. It is a much better PDF reader than the built-in app on iOS
devices, makes cropping out PDF whitespace easy, has support for annotation &
highlighting, and can load PDFs straight off of Dropbox.

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jmcguckin
i use an ipad.

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earl
Does anybody have any experience using an ipad? It has a full pdf reader so
that at least should work well.

