Having been the owner of the Cybook Gen 3 for some days, I have fallen completely in love with the ease of buying an eBook. Books not available in my city, which could have taken 2-3 weeks from the time of ordering, are at my finger tops just within minutes!
All kinds of books are available in the Gen 3 supported formats, novels, science fiction, love, etc. However, the category (no pun intended) of books that I seek, stay unseen. I am talking about academic books, books on Category Theory, Support Vector Machines, and other parts of Computer Science. Searching the net desperately, I found some eBooks on Finite Automata and Cellular Automata. However, other sciences seem to be over represented in the set of eBooks.
By a sheer coincidence, I found Taylor & Francis, an eBook store specializing in Academia. Here, I also observed that Computer Science is gravely under-represented. In total, the catalogue of academic titles is quite thin and should be expanded.
I will try to contact some of the publishers and ask them if it's possible to buy their books in Secure Mobipocket format.
Conclusively:
There are far too few academic titles available in eBook format, more should be added, given that academic books tend to range 400 - 900 pages, it would be a considerable improvement in terms of sustainability to keep these pages digital.
/Gf
Showing posts with label Reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reading. Show all posts
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Friday, August 8, 2008
PDF support is ... not impressive
After buying "Making Money", I also downloaded a set of different papers on Arrows , Category Theory, Lambda calculus and of course, Philip Wadler's excellent paper on monads (to honor him) into the Gen3.
Of course, one expects to be able to zoom if the pdf doesn't fit well. This is what I thought, but alas; no. The pdf in question was not readable unless I used an electron microscope, even if I set the layout to "Landscape" and "Fit to width", searching the documentation for zoom availability, it is never mentioned how you zoom manually. After some time, I resigned, accepting the harsh fact that there is no manual zoom levels available for the Gen3, what is referred to as "zoom", is actually the three different fits "Fit page, Fit to width, Fit height", which can be used in combination with "Landscape" and "Portrait", giving a total of 2*3 = 6 different "zooms" (most being equally or worse unreadable with a PDF).
A bit shocked by this, I surfed in on the Bookeen page, and found the forums, doing a quick search on "PDF support" or simply "PDF", reveals yet a shocking fact! Most readers out there seem to have the same problem! So, the solution?
Cropping. Simply remove all the white edges on your documents, (another forum post suggested converting the whole PDF into images), I must admit I haven't tested that, since the cropping method worked fine for me. Of course, you must have some program for this, but Adobe Acrobat Pro will suffice perfectly. On linux, imagemagick's convert should work as well. There are surely hundreds of different solutions to this, but It did the trick for me; fortunately I had Adobe Acrobat Pro in Windows Vista, thus making this easy.
Conclusively:
It sucks not to be able to zoom with different manual levels, it sucks that almost no portable eBook reader handles PDF in a descent way. Cropping is your answer for the moment, converting the PDFs into another format will only degenerate the PDF-file to something unreadable. This must be fixed in firmware releases.
Update:
Selecting Advanced -> Advanced Editing -> Crop Tool -> "Remove white margins" made the PDFs extremely more readable with Landscape -> Fit to width.
/Gf
Of course, one expects to be able to zoom if the pdf doesn't fit well. This is what I thought, but alas; no. The pdf in question was not readable unless I used an electron microscope, even if I set the layout to "Landscape" and "Fit to width", searching the documentation for zoom availability, it is never mentioned how you zoom manually. After some time, I resigned, accepting the harsh fact that there is no manual zoom levels available for the Gen3, what is referred to as "zoom", is actually the three different fits "Fit page, Fit to width, Fit height", which can be used in combination with "Landscape" and "Portrait", giving a total of 2*3 = 6 different "zooms" (most being equally or worse unreadable with a PDF).
A bit shocked by this, I surfed in on the Bookeen page, and found the forums, doing a quick search on "PDF support" or simply "PDF", reveals yet a shocking fact! Most readers out there seem to have the same problem! So, the solution?
Cropping. Simply remove all the white edges on your documents, (another forum post suggested converting the whole PDF into images), I must admit I haven't tested that, since the cropping method worked fine for me. Of course, you must have some program for this, but Adobe Acrobat Pro will suffice perfectly. On linux, imagemagick's convert should work as well. There are surely hundreds of different solutions to this, but It did the trick for me; fortunately I had Adobe Acrobat Pro in Windows Vista, thus making this easy.
Conclusively:
It sucks not to be able to zoom with different manual levels, it sucks that almost no portable eBook reader handles PDF in a descent way. Cropping is your answer for the moment, converting the PDFs into another format will only degenerate the PDF-file to something unreadable. This must be fixed in firmware releases.
Update:
Selecting Advanced -> Advanced Editing -> Crop Tool -> "Remove white margins" made the PDFs extremely more readable with Landscape -> Fit to width.
/Gf
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Finally got my eBook reader
After quite some waiting, the ebook reader arrived. All specs can be found on the Bookeen page, this entry will only be my own personal experiences of this device.
As promised, the screen does look like paper, I must say it has a more grayish tone than normal cheap pocket paper, but it suffices perfectly. No reflection or problem reading characters. When connecting the Gen3 to the computer (I use both Windows Vista and Ubuntu) the device shows it's connected by by displaying a "Connected" text together with an image of the Usb connector.
The size is all okay, a little larger than a pocket, and smaller than an average paper back novel. For comparison, I shot the Gen3 besides Beta.
The device came with some free books, a manual and some demo books. I also bought an SD card of 2GB, it shows up in windows as a separate? device which has the same internal directory structure as the on board memory of the device. Disregarding this, I start by purging all the unwanted demo books and demo images. Unluckily, not all the demo books have a demo suffix (some files have a "demo" suffix which eases the job considerably), as for those wondering if there is some "Remove book" option inside the menu ... there is none (should be added). Thus, after the purge what remains is
Cybook Gen3 - User Manual
Accelerando
Hans Christian Andersen - Contes Merveilleux
Bach [musical notes]
Bronte Emily - Les hauts De Hurlevent
Don Quichotte (First book)
Bram Stoker - Dracula
Crime And Punishment
I Robot
Nouvelles Histories Extraordinaires
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
Needles to say, there where some french texts in there, and they also had to go for the benefit of the freshly bought "Making Money from Terry Pratchett", as this is my first ever bought EBook, I must say this was extremely easy. A lot of ebook (re?)sellers can be found on the Mobipocket Ebase 1.0. I set for "Fictionwise eBooks" which seemed to have a reasonable price. (Amazon would be the first choice, but buying their ebooks in another format than "Kindle" format is obscured beyond recognition; honestly I don't even know if they have another format than "Kindle" and on that matter, why foul things up with yet another format?).
So, disregarding Amazon for their lack of clarity (and because Kindle is ONLY sold in the US; thank you so much!), I bought the book (which was extremely easy;
1) Choose the book
2) Select format [secure Mobipocket]
3) Pay.
Once the purchase is complete, I entered the "Bookshelf" section of my account. This is where I had to register with my Mobipocket Reader PID (only once; several could be registered)
4) Register my Mobipocket PID
5) Download the book to my computer
And this is where Windows started to get annoying (should have done this in Ubuntu), Vista suddenly would not find my USB devices ... (a restart later), I dragged and dropped the eBook into the eBooks directory (just to make it more interesting, I actually copied it into the SD-memory "eBooks" directory), disconnected the Gen3, and voila, the book is readable!
Conclusively:
All my future books will be digital / eBooks, moving my library with me could not be easier, Amazon is obscure and the market of available eBook readers is surprisingly thin for the Europeans.
/Gf
As promised, the screen does look like paper, I must say it has a more grayish tone than normal cheap pocket paper, but it suffices perfectly. No reflection or problem reading characters. When connecting the Gen3 to the computer (I use both Windows Vista and Ubuntu) the device shows it's connected by by displaying a "Connected" text together with an image of the Usb connector.
The size is all okay, a little larger than a pocket, and smaller than an average paper back novel. For comparison, I shot the Gen3 besides Beta.
The device came with some free books, a manual and some demo books. I also bought an SD card of 2GB, it shows up in windows as a separate? device which has the same internal directory structure as the on board memory of the device. Disregarding this, I start by purging all the unwanted demo books and demo images. Unluckily, not all the demo books have a demo suffix (some files have a "demo" suffix which eases the job considerably), as for those wondering if there is some "Remove book" option inside the menu ... there is none (should be added). Thus, after the purge what remains is
Cybook Gen3 - User Manual
Accelerando
Hans Christian Andersen - Contes Merveilleux
Bach [musical notes]
Bronte Emily - Les hauts De Hurlevent
Don Quichotte (First book)
Bram Stoker - Dracula
Crime And Punishment
I Robot
Nouvelles Histories Extraordinaires
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
Needles to say, there where some french texts in there, and they also had to go for the benefit of the freshly bought "Making Money from Terry Pratchett", as this is my first ever bought EBook, I must say this was extremely easy. A lot of ebook (re?)sellers can be found on the Mobipocket Ebase 1.0. I set for "Fictionwise eBooks" which seemed to have a reasonable price. (Amazon would be the first choice, but buying their ebooks in another format than "Kindle" format is obscured beyond recognition; honestly I don't even know if they have another format than "Kindle" and on that matter, why foul things up with yet another format?).
So, disregarding Amazon for their lack of clarity (and because Kindle is ONLY sold in the US; thank you so much!), I bought the book (which was extremely easy;
1) Choose the book
2) Select format [secure Mobipocket]
3) Pay.
Once the purchase is complete, I entered the "Bookshelf" section of my account. This is where I had to register with my Mobipocket Reader PID (only once; several could be registered)
4) Register my Mobipocket PID
5) Download the book to my computer
And this is where Windows started to get annoying (should have done this in Ubuntu), Vista suddenly would not find my USB devices ... (a restart later), I dragged and dropped the eBook into the eBooks directory (just to make it more interesting, I actually copied it into the SD-memory "eBooks" directory), disconnected the Gen3, and voila, the book is readable!
Conclusively:
All my future books will be digital / eBooks, moving my library with me could not be easier, Amazon is obscure and the market of available eBook readers is surprisingly thin for the Europeans.
/Gf
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Sustainable reading
E-book reader, digital reader, portable book reader, whatever you choose to call it, it's portable, (preferably small and mobile) and should be able to handle at least raw text, PDF files , HTML and some type of e-book format.
I finally bought one, (I've been drooling over them since I first saw Star Trek where they have plenty of portable digital book readers to go around) and I'm still waiting for it to arrive.
I'll give a detailed description of how this device turns out, and also write a bit about the current state of affairs of books and sustainability.
/Gf
I finally bought one, (I've been drooling over them since I first saw Star Trek where they have plenty of portable digital book readers to go around) and I'm still waiting for it to arrive.
I'll give a detailed description of how this device turns out, and also write a bit about the current state of affairs of books and sustainability.
/Gf
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
