On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 7:56 AM, Laura Conrad <[email protected]> wrote: >>>>>> "Chris" == Chris O'Connell <[email protected]> writes: > > Chris> I'm adamant about buying only ebooks from now on. The > Chris> problem is that very few publishers provide their books in a > Chris> DRM free format. O'Reilly is one notable exception. > > Baen is another. > > Chris> I won't be pirating my books, but I don't like the idea of > Chris> being tied to one device or company (The kindle for example, > Chris> or BN & their crappy nook). I want PDF portability. > > Chris> Any suggestions? > > PDF is good for portability between large devices, but for reading on > small screens, you'd really rather have something that reflows to fit > the screen, like html or epub.
>From my experience so far with the Kindle, even ebook formats don't work that well for books with lots of images, charts, graphs, etc. I think the screen on such devices is just too small to do this well. The Kindle screen isn't even as big as a mass market paperback and it seems rare to see anything published in that format which depends on content which isn't reflowable. Even when I select the inline graphics to 'zoom' them, they are often still hard to view and doing so disturbs the reading process. I really want to look at the graphic at the same time that I'm reading the text. Admittedly, this could be peculiar to the books/device (Kindle) that I'm using and it may work better on other similar sized devices. If the Kindle did away with its keyboard and went to a touchscreen, it could at least increase it's screen to the size of a mass market paperback which would help some, but probably not enough. Since I hoped to read technical publications on my 'book' reader, I think I see a tablet of some sort in my future. Bill Bogstad _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
