On Fri, 28 Jan 2011, JP Hindin wrote: Head over to the Baen books website (http://www.webscription.net if memory serves). You can buy a "month" of books for $15 (typically 5 books), no DRM and they offer (among many) the Mobi book format that the Kindle will read. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.simpits.org/geneb - The Me-109F/X Project ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_! Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 09:01, Tom Uban <uban at ubanproductions.com> wrote: I have a 6-inch Kindle; while it does read PDFs well, the small screen makes reading standard Letter sized documents a bit of a hassle to read. Either it's eye-killingly small or you have to scroll all over the place. I don't know if any of the documents on Bitsavers are in a format that can be easily converted, but any document that is fairly simple HTML with inline pictures can easily be converted using various tools (Calibre) into .mobi, which the Kindle accepts natively, and you can read it as any e-book with your preference of font, orientation, etc etc. For my own documents, I have played a little with reformatting my LaTeX documents to generate PDFs with smaller page size (ebooks do not display math as far as I can tell). ISTR that decoding a large page in a PDF can be quite slow and slow to scroll, too. I think (non-e) paper still wins on this one. The kindle can be propped up against something on your workbench and not take up space for a keyboard. But the small screen is a challenge. The DX is one solution. Maybe the various pads will be better for these tasks; faster cpus and touchscreens will help. Joe. -- Joachim Thiemann :: http://www.tsp.ece.mcgill.ca/~jthiem

Instead of going the Kindle route, I purchased a 7" Android tablet through Merimobiles (mine is a "generation" old, but the closest comparison is at http://www.merimobiles.com/Moonse_APAD_E7001_Aluminium_Version_APP_Market_p…). It bears some of the limitations of the Kindle: small screen, relatively slow rendering. But it does include a micro-SD slot, which makes it easier to have a lot of content. The app Documents To Go (it's $5 or $10, and definitely worth it) includes a pretty good PDF reader - it hasn't choked on anything I've offered it, including scanned papers and large PDF engineering drawings. (It reads *and writes* MS-Office docs, too.) It does have a touchscreen, making panning easier. It does WiFi, but not Bluetooth. And it's $145. There is a site (www.slatedroid.com) that supports a vibrant community around these things, including a guy (Roger Braun) who creates new flash images for them. I upgraded mine with one of his images and it was not only easier to use (the stock image contains several apps in Chinese, that did me no good) but it seems faster. There is an app store, although one caveat: the device I bought is Android 1.6, and some newer apps just won't run on it (but they don't appear in its app store, either.) USB will either support an external device such as a keyboard or mount the device as a USB function-based storage device on your desktop/laptop, making it dead easy to get things on and off the device. Did I mention the screen is color! While I think the eInk is well done and nice to look at, it's a plus to have the color screen, especially when I'm reading the Sunday paper and get to the comics. (I don't buy the newspaper anymore - there's an app for that.) I am not associated with Merimobiles other than as a satisfied customer -- Ian ________________________________________ From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Joachim Thiemann [joachim.thiemann at gmail.com] Sent: Friday, January 28, 2011 7:52 AM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Cc: classiccmp at classiccmp.org Subject: Re: Kindle and bitsavers? On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 09:01, Tom Uban <uban at ubanproductions.com> wrote: I have a 6-inch Kindle; while it does read PDFs well, the small screen makes reading standard Letter sized documents a bit of a hassle to read. Either it's eye-killingly small or you have to scroll all over the place. I don't know if any of the documents on Bitsavers are in a format that can be easily converted, but any document that is fairly simple HTML with inline pictures can easily be converted using various tools (Calibre) into .mobi, which the Kindle accepts natively, and you can read it as any e-book with your preference of font, orientation, etc etc. For my own documents, I have played a little with reformatting my LaTeX documents to generate PDFs with smaller page size (ebooks do not display math as far as I can tell). ISTR that decoding a large page in a PDF can be quite slow and slow to scroll, too. I think (non-e) paper still wins on this one. The kindle can be propped up against something on your workbench and not take up space for a keyboard. But the small screen is a challenge. The DX is one solution. Maybe the various pads will be better for these tasks; faster cpus and touchscreens will help. Joe. -- Joachim Thiemann :: http://www.tsp.ece.mcgill.ca/~jthiem

FWIW, I'm writing this email on my Android tablet, using a USB keyboard (Fellowes Stowaway) and my finger as the pointing device - I've found that the apps tend to get confused by a mouse pointer, since it represents a state and the pointer metaphor of the Android touchscreen is effectively stateless. The tablet is propped up on the brim of my hat - I have yet to find a sufficiently portable stand or easel for the device when I'm using it this way. But having it supported by my "Indiana Jones" leather hat is sufficiently non sequitur that I'm enjoying the dissonance.... -- Ian ________________________________________ From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Ethan Dicks [ethan.dicks at gmail.com] Sent: Friday, January 28, 2011 9:53 AM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Cc: classiccmp at classiccmp.org Subject: Re: Kindle and bitsavers? On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 11:39 AM, Ian King <IanK at vulcan.com> wrote: Based on Ian's experiences and recommendation, I purchased a successor product from Merimobiles (a Haipad M701R, about $25 more than the E7001, faster CPU, Android 2.1, double the RAM, HDMI out, IR remote control for the media player...) The micro-SD slot is a very nice feature. I've got 8GB dropped into mine (came with the tablet for free as a promotional) I haven't tried that PDF reader - I'm using the free one from Adobe. I'm also using it to view *large* PDFs with mixed results. Mine was $169 plus postage from Shanghai. I'm still interested in ePaper as a technology, but the E702R is a full-on tablet computer, not "merely" an eBook reader, so it naturally has an LCD screen, and that means color (whether I wanted it or not). Ditto. My issues are with the limitations of an inexpensive device. I am satisfied with my experiences with Merimobiles. -ethan