I'm an academic too (assistant prof in business dept at an R1 school in the USA, about to move abroad to a European school), and I am having similar needs. A few weeks ago, I picked up the K2. I use the K2 strictly for Amazon content and the occasional .doc file.
And just a couple days ago, I picked up the iRex 1000s. Basically the iRex appears to be the best bet if you are interested in reading 2-column PDF's with the capability to annotate with your own handwriting. The Kindle DX apparently cannot match the iRex along these lines.
The other good thing is that the iRex comes with an SD card slot, so you can use a 32GB card with it. AFAIK, the Kindle DX restricts you to its resident memory capacity. I'm looking to put my entire collection of PDF articles on my e-reader, so I'm possibly looking at about 5-10 GB worth of PDF's. The iRex quickly became my only option.
I get it delivered in 4-6 days, and I'm likely to add my .02 to the mobileread forum after I've played around with it for a while.
-cmhsieh54
Quote:
Originally Posted by hermance
The idea of being able to travel and work without having to lug an extra 5-10 pounds of books (and figure out *which* 5-10 pounds of books I’ll use at any given time) is so alluring. In addition, it’s amazing to think about being at a conference or archive and have easy access to a source I didn’t even know I might need access to....
Here's what I'd like to be able to read, in order of priority:
(1) Public domain books that are out of print and not available from my university's rather small library. Currently, I save most of these books to my laptop via Google Books. It'd be great to have access to them without needing to lug my whole laptop around.
(2) Academic journal articles. I get most of these in PDF or HTML format. Does anyone know about remote access to databases via the wifi capability on e-readers?
(3) Fiction for pleasure. I imagine this would be a mix of new books available via Amazon (or other ebook retailer/site) and public domain books.
(4) Mass market periodicals—probably only free content.
Here are some of my usage concerns:
(1) Searching is really important, which may altogether eliminate the Sony 505.
(2) I’m moderately interested in being able to annotate and underline. However, I'm not sure how much I would use such features because it just doesn’t seem like a very efficient way to annotate. Anyone care to weigh in on this?
(3) I want it to be easy to transfer and read PDF files, especially since I predict that most of my e-reader content will be from Google Books and PDFs of journal articles.
(4) I’d love to be able to access my Zotero library through the e-reader but am not sure how practicable that is...
Kindle—not sure whether the 2 or the DX would be right. I’d like a smaller size, but if I understand correctly, the DX is the device for PDFs.
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