Why I want a big screen ereader

[jj2me]

Originally Posted by GuillaumeJay

Same here, with an old Toshiba M200.
Agree for the clumsy/akward feeling (compared to my "regular" ebook reader, a Dell PDA).

Some netbooks are going to (alreay are ?) 10", with tablet mode. That should be big enough for pdf, and lighter/smaller (the M200 is quite thick). Anyway, since I bought my tablet (Dec 08) planning to use it at least half the time as a pdf reader, I've read maybe 400 pages on it. But as a small laptop which i can take everywhere (not like my 17") to program on it, I'd like it a lot

+3

The OP should try an HP 2730p Tablet PC. 12" screen, 3.7 lbs., with 5+ hrs. battery life. Portrait Mode is a great reading experience. Read PDFs using the program PDF Annotator instead of Adobe Acrobat Reader and you can ink your notes directly in your handwriting, highlight, all sorts of things.

Very suitable until the ultimate large color e-ink device is invented.

[ny10522]

A big disadvantage to any large screen reader is....WEIGHT!
I don't think these devices can be comfortably held with one arm while relaxing on a recliner.

[Jack Tingle]

Originally Posted by jgray

Why is it that none of the PDF reading software has an option that lets you display a full page without the whitespace margins? This alone would make reading a PDF on smaller screens much easier.

I'm not sure that's even possible with an untagged PDF file. (Tagging adds additional info, but if it's tagged, you wouldn't have that problem.)

"Each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout 2D document ... that includes the text, fonts, images, and 2D vector graphics which compose the documents." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdf

The assumption in pdf was that the page was the essential unit of a document, so the files are paginated. Otherwise PDF is "just" tokenized and compressed Postscript. You get the bulk of a paginated form, with the sloth of PS! The best of all possible bad worlds, IMO. The whole house of cards teeters back in history to print drivers for the original Mac. (Actually, a bit farther back than that, but the Mac was the big thing.)

I almost never use PDF if there's any alternative.

Regards,
Jack Tingle

[Spectrum]

I want big screen so I can read engineering textbooks with lot of equations and graphs...

[wchris]

Many of the respondents are thinking only in terms of reading novels. What about technical books, gardening manuals, travelogues, photographic essays, etc. These are all impossible with a 5 inch screen. Colour of course would also be helpful. However, as someone who needs larger fonts because of poor eyesight, a major advantage of a bigger screen would that I would be able to read a complete page rather than a single paragraph at a time. I know I could use a cheap laptop, but I appreciate the battery life on my Sony.

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by jgray

Why is it that none of the PDF reading software has an option that lets you display a full page without the whitespace margins?

There is viewer software that does this. On the desktop Okular is one example, and there are probably others. I seem to recall that the PRS-500 does this (or perhaps the initial PRS-505 firmware), because there were complaints when Adobe Digital Editions on the PRS-505 did not have this option. The PDF reader on the Hanlin also crops the margins as its first "zoom" level.

One problem with on-the-fly cropping is that headers and footers can't easily be cropped and different pages get cropped differently if the algorithm is applied per page (and if not, left vs right pages can cause problems since they often need different cropping).

[Jeff Duntemann]

What he said. Exactly what he said. Emphatically what he said.

This perspective needs to be heard a lot more often here.

[Robertb]

Originally Posted by wchris

Many of the respondents are thinking only in terms of reading novels. What about technical books, gardening manuals, travelogues, photographic essays, etc. These are all impossible with a 5 inch screen. Colour of course would also be helpful. However, as someone who needs larger fonts because of poor eyesight, a major advantage of a bigger screen would that I would be able to read a complete page rather than a single paragraph at a time. I know I could use a cheap laptop, but I appreciate the battery life on my Sony.

Dear wchris:

Astak is planning along these same lines. We have an NDA in place with a company that prohibits me from saying too much. In effect, the 10.1 inch device by Astak, using this new technology, allows full E-Ink benefits when there is light or when you do not need COLOR (meaning you get no eye strain and you get the exceptional battery life). WHEN you wish to view something in color, you have a backlight that allows this. The result is a color device with battery life that exceeds 12-15 hours or more.

This device has become almost an obsession with Astak. We are actively pursuing this. Plans are to have the prototype working no later than September. At that point it would either go straight into production or be more fine tuned and released at the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas (January 7-10, 2010). The code name is: Astak Spectrum.

I assure you that it is moving forward! Please do not ask for a price yet... that is a few months away.

Astak is an eBook Reader Manufacturer and presently has two lines: "EZ Reader" and "Mentor"!

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by Robertb

WHEN you wish to view something in color, you have a backlight that allows this. The result is a color device with battery life that exceeds 12-15 hours or more.

This device has become almost an obsession with Astak. We are actively pursuing this. Plans are to have the prototype working no later than September.

Interesting. But I assume that is September in "RobertB" time? So, we just don't know what year you mean.

BOb

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

But I assume that is September in "RobertB" time?

Release dates are always uncertain, particularly in a recession, but this sounds like a Pixel Qi screen and they are saying "sample in Spring 2009 and ship in high volume in Summer 2009". This is the successor to the OLPC screen (David Rothman: Why I favor Mary Lou’s OLPC screen tech over E Ink—at least for MY purposes).

[Semantic]

Originally Posted by jj2me

+3

The OP should try an HP 2730p Tablet PC. 12" screen, 3.7 lbs., with 5+ hrs. battery life. Portrait Mode is a great reading experience. Read PDFs using the program PDF Annotator instead of Adobe Acrobat Reader and you can ink your notes directly in your handwriting, highlight, all sorts of things.

Very suitable until the ultimate large color e-ink device is invented.

I have a fujitsu T2010 which is similar, but longer battery life ($6-700 on eBay too). Problem is the loud fan.

The Fujitsu P1620 is also about $600 on eBay, but is a 8.9inch device and weighs 2.2lbs..

Having just broken the chassis of my T2010 I'm going to try and make it into a 2lb slate, should be interesting

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The "mouse's tail" can be done very nicely in Mobi - it's used as an example of text formatting on the Mobi developer's site.

Link please?

[thibaulthalpern]

I agree with most of what you said. I've said some of the things you said before regarding why I prefer the PDF format. I've also made the argument on this forum before that reading it's JUST about the text although to different reasons that you make (though I do agree with your reasons). Reading is also about marking up books--not always and not for all reading occasions, but it can for many occasions.

There's still a LONG way to go for eBook development. It's not the end-all be-all. Books, the printed versions, still have a great place and will for a long, long time.

[thibaulthalpern]

Originally Posted by vivaldirules

I agree with you Daithi. There would be nothing simpler than having a large format reader that would display PDFs created from scans of books (from Google, etc.) You don't have to live with someone's bad OCR of the text, or figure out how to get tables or poetry to appear correctly when you do the conversion, no fussing with the illustrations, or bash your head trying to figure out what the heck to do with equations. What a bunch of nonsense! There would be no conversion required at all - just load the PDF and read. There would not be a convenient table of contents, the ability to change fonts, or a dictionary function. But I would gladly live without those.

I agree! Many people but perhaps not most on this forum, don't really care to convert items to a "better" format. Many, myself including, simply want to load the file and read it with ease just like one does with a book. I don't need to learn to glue the pages of a book or typeset the document to read it. I just read.

[DG25]

The ideal reader for me would be this:

10" touch screen tablet with PixelQ screen and Wi-Fi. The software should have a web browser (with flash support) and an ebook reader. Essentially a web tablet, for reading web pages (with regular lcd mode) and an ebook reader, for reading, well, ebooks (in eink lcd mode).