Wheew, it’s been a while – classes and work have been keeping me busy, and I’m finally starting to feel like a normal person again. Now that I have some more free time, I want to get back into the habit of reading books again. It gets difficult though, because it is often inconvenient for me to carry a book around, particularly if I’m already bringing my computer with me. Some of the nonfiction books on my reading list are quite bulky, and end up sitting on my shelf while I work my way through the smaller fiction books more easily.
So one thing that’s been on my mind a lot is the perfect ebook reader (as evidenced by my Tumblr posts). I succeeded in turning my DS into a mini ebook reader, but the startup time is long enough to be a significant barrier. By the time I start it up, load the book, and find the right bookmark, the TA has already shown up for office hours, and I have to hurriedly put it away again.
What impresses me about Kindle is that it actually has a few significant improvements over a real book (and by “significant”, I mean that it overcomes flaws inherent in paper books). For example, being able to read while lying down without having to constantly shift weight would be a huge plus. I was also quite happy to note that the Kindle indicates where you are in the book, plus where you are in each book on your shelf. Given that I constantly feel the stack of pages left in the book with my thumb when I read (a strange quirk, I know), this is a nice substitute. It won’t feel as concrete, but it’ll be better than judging by page numbers.
I could probably ignore the ugliness, but the dealbreaker is not being able to put my own PDFs on the device easily. I end up reading papers for class quite often, or long articles from the internet, and being able to read these with high fidelity (something that HTML files would not guarantee) on the ebook reader would be great. If this limitation was removed, I would probably pay the $400 to get one.
(Note: There are supposedly methods to convert PDFs to a compatible format, but that always leads to strange formatting, particularly with papers that are formatting-intensive. I’ve had enough experience with converting things to be wary of anything less than native support for PDFs.)
The features I want, in order of importance:
- Ease-of-use. If it feels clunky or takes too long to navigate around a book, then I’ll end up choosing a real book over it every time.
- Appearance. That’s right, I want it to look pretty.
- Ability to load any PDFs onto it – Most common formats can be converted easily to PDF.
- Useful features. Things like bookmarking, writing notes, highlighting, and saving quotes with a record of the source would be nice to have.
- Long battery life. With e-ink, this should no longer be an issue.
- Capacity. I can live with a small capacity, by shifting books around, but it’s always nice to have a large selection available.
- Tactile feel. There is a certain quality to books that gives reading a special feel. It’s hard to put that feeling into concrete words, but it’s a combination of the weight of the book (particularly the weight of the left half versus the right half, and how that changes as you finish reading more of the book) and the feeling of the paper. A device won’t be able to duplicate this, but it has to at least have a decent feel to it
[...] (Guest Writer) no_spam@olpcnews.com wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptSo one thing that’s been on my mind a lot is the perfect ebook reader (as evidenced by my Tumblr posts). I succeeded in turning my DS into a mini ebook reader, but the startup time is long enough to be a significant barrier. … [...]
I saw a Kindle yesterday–one of the other TA’s had one since he works for Amazon. It’s a lot less fugly than it looks in the photos. But he confirmed that the PDF support is kind of pathetic, so I guess you’ll have to look elsewhere.
Ah well, maybe next version will be good/better!