[Gllug] ebook readers for technical books

[Andrew Farnsworth]

On Wed Oct 21 10:44 , Matthew King <matthew.king at monnsta.net> sent:

>"Sean Burlington" sean at practicalweb.co.uk> writes:
>
>>> I played a bit with the Sony reader and was unimpressed, it felt
>>> cumbersome and very impractical.
>>
>> But the screen is so much more comfortable to read than a computer screen.
>
>Are there any ebooks with the fancy screens which are hackable? Maybe to
>the point of running X/$your_poison but at least to allow communication
>with a proper computer (eg. some form of text-to-pdf).
>
>Rationale: It would be wonderful to sit in the garden typing on the
>laptop but with the results coming up on something as easy on the eye as
>a sheet of paper.

Matthew,
  I have a Kindle and the screen is very readable in direct sunlight, however,
since it is a reflective screen only you have to have a booklight if you want to
read in the dark.  Also, the screen does not have a refresh rate in the Hz
range... (cycles / second) more like 2 seconds to refresh the page.  Hence the
reason they don't use them on laptops or other devices you want to see motion on
the screen or anything else like that.
  As to DRM, if you have the books you want in any kind of open format or PDF you
can convert them to Kindle readable on your computer or you can email them to
Amazon and they will convert them automatically for you and email you back a
link.  They will also send them to your kindle directly via whispernet for $0.10
/ document.  Well, here in the USA anyway, I don't know what the cost per
document is in the UK for the new International Kindle.  Regardless, you can pull
them down to your computer and then put them on your kindle using the USB cable.
 I have a ton of books that I have in PDF or other format that I have converted
to work on my Kindle.  In fact, I am not sure I have purchased a kindle book from
Amazon yet.  (ok, I have but only the Free ones).

Andy
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