Reading technical books on an ereader. Help?

[jezebel]

I was looking at some of the deals on O'Reilly tech books and am very interested in a couple. I downloaded a sample of one I wanted (the sample is a pdf). The links are clickable in Acrobat on my computer, but not on my Kindle or Aluratek Libre.

Can anyone who has any of these tell me if any of the other formats have clickable links? I ask because I want to be able to navigate easily around such a big book on a reader.

[rkomar]

I have a fair number of their books in PDF and EPUB formats, and the internal links work fine on my Sony and PocketBook readers. I expect their books in MOBI format would work well on your Kindle. See if you can get a MOBI sample from them to try before buying.

[cu_cannon]

I much prefer paper books for technical references. It is much easer to flip back and forth between topics and tab pages for later use. I generally need to have several references available at once making ereaders unsuitable. In my opinion quick navigation and switching between files are the biggest shortcomings of ereaders for reference material.

That being said, I have not had any problems navigating links in pdf and epub documents on my Sony. It may be a problem with the links in the pdf or the sample may not have active links.

[jezebel]

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll definitely try to get a mobi sample.

Originally Posted by cu_cannon

I much prefer paper books for technical references. It is much easer to flip back and forth between topics and tab pages for later use. I generally need to have several references available at once making ereaders unsuitable. In my opinion quick navigation and switching between files are the biggest shortcomings of ereaders for reference material.

Agreed.

[Anthem]

Originally Posted by cu_cannon

I much prefer paper books for technical references. It is much easer to flip back and forth between topics and tab pages for later use. I generally need to have several references available at once making ereaders unsuitable. In my opinion quick navigation and switching between files are the biggest shortcomings of ereaders for reference material.

Originally Posted by jezebel

Agreed.

Double agreed.

[tomsem]

Even if PDF links worked on Kindle, you would still be better off using the mobi version there in most cases, when that format is available, since the text can get really small (though I own a couple of O'Reilly books that are only in PDF and can read them okay).

Better navigation is needed in any case. For example, O'Reilly should add 'back links' from chapter/section headings to jump to where they are referenced in TOC (even in PDF). Of course, since they are DRM free, you could add these yourself, probably even using a script.

In terms of reader software, they need ability to navigate viewing history (just as you can with a web browser) so you can jump around within a book, or from one book to another more easily. For example, iFlowReader (for iOS) has this feature, and I trust others will recognize the benefits of this and do something similar or improve on it.

Paper books are clearly superior if you are co-located with them, but you can't carry your entire library around with you, so there are definitely times when ebooks are more convenient - and they are certainly less expensive in most cases (at least O'Reilly titles are).

[KenJackson]

I found this thread as I was preparing to start a thread asking if anyone had read an O'Reilly EPUB and what the experience was like. Normally I would just buy it, especially since they are nice enough to sell w/o DRM. But their prices are high enough that I wanted some confirmation. I have a whole bunch of their pbooks and find them to be really helpful.

Originally Posted by cu_cannon

I much prefer paper books for technical references. It is much easer to flip back and forth between topics and tab pages for later use.

As an interesting converse, there have been numerous times in the past ten years or so (since I started reading a lot of on-line stuff and PDFs etc.) that I've wanted to find something in a paper book that I knew I had seen but couldn't find. On those occasions, I found myself thinking, I'll just search for it, only to come crashing back to reality--paper books don't have that capability.

Originally Posted by cu_cannon

I generally need to have several references available at once making ereaders unsuitable.

Me too. But I'm just about to buy my first O'Reilly ebook. I specifically want it as an ebook because I intend to read much of it straight through on my Sony Reader.

I figure later when I need to reference it, I'll be able to open multiple instances on my PC with the FBReader, EPUBRead in Firefox, or Calibre's ebook-viewer.

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by KenJackson

I found this thread as I was preparing to start a thread asking if anyone had read an O'Reilly EPUB and what the experience was like. Normally I would just buy it, especially since they are nice enough to sell w/o DRM. But their prices are high enough that I wanted some confirmation. I have a whole bunch of their pbooks and find them to be really helpful.

I have a couple dozen of them, mostly of the type that is for linear reading (as opposed to reference). The EPUB versions work very well on my PRS-505, so I expect them to be even better on the 650. Code snippets that are wide can get a bit confusing when they wrap around, but if you have a computer, you can look at the snippets on that when you absolutely need to see them accurately.

The Sony ereaders have a glitch with their table of contents menus, in that you can't just jump to the page of any item that has sub-items (it can only take you to the sub-item list). I posted a python script to these forums a few months ago that massaged the EPUB table of contents to get around this. See this post: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...70#post1225570

Once you become a member of the O'Reilly site, they send you many discount offers: 2-for-1, 60% off,... You can get them quite cheaply if you're patient. And you can take many format versions of each book, and they notify you when there is a free update for any book you bought (they recently improved the fonts for EPUBs), and there is no DRM,... O'Reilly do everything right, and I wish other vendors would follow suit.