I still
believe in Kindle. For me, it is a perfect solution to a
paper-free world (which I don't want to live in, but sometimes is good to
have most of your techinical books and manuals in such a small package!)
How many kindles do you have to buy to replicate getting a few fold
out diagrams text pages etc out of a manual when servicing a device
Paper therefore rules and I am a kindle free zone
I _much_ prefer books on paper. You can flip between pages quickly
(somthing that you can't do on any bookreader type thing I've tried), you
ccan have foldouts opened and read the reat of the book. You can have
several books open at once and readable at once. And paper books do not
need cheging, they don;t crash, and the publisher can't make them
disapper from your bookshelves. So NO WAY am I going to replace a paper
book with an ebook, and given the choice I wil lbuy the paper book even
if it costs a lot more
BUT...
Information that is inconveniet to use is better than no informatio nat all.
Recenely a household hardware shop chain in the UK (Robert Dyas in case
it matters) were selling off a cheap E-book reader for \pounds 19.00. I
bought one with the intention of experiemntign with the colour LCD
display module. Of course I openeed it up, it contaisn a RockChip SoC, an
SDRAM, a Flash memory device and not a lot more. The CPU in the SoC is
not suprisingly an ARM of some flavour.
But befoe I raided the dispaly from it, I decided to try it out. It will
display most .pdf files I've thrown at at. And while readign a DEC
printset on that size display involves a lot of scrolling around, it's
preferenable, as I said, ot no scheamtics at all.
So I went abck and bought a second one to raid the dispaly from, use as
apares, etc....
Things I like about it is that it has real buttons, not a touchscreen. I
loathe touchscreens. I also has the feature that it appears as a couple
of USB mass storage devices (one for the itnernal memory, one for the
micoSD card you cna slot in). Which means it cab be trivially mounted by
the RPi. It does not depend o na particualr OS to be useful.
-tony
