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Old 04-21-2009, 01:16 PM   #1
Daithi
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Why I want a big screen ereader

I want an ereader that can display a full page PDF.

It's great having an ereader that can display the text of a novel, but I would like something that can display PDFs of full sized pages. Some books just can't be appreciated on the same level without things like the illustrations. For example, a book like Alice in Wonderland is simply far better as a PDF than as reflowing text. Even when the illustrations are included in the ebook the PDF version would still be far better. In the PDF version the text flows around the images that are in the book, and in one section of Alice in Wonderland the text is written in such a way that it looks like a mouse's tail. It curves around the page and it uses a font that gets smaller and smaller. Ereaders like the Kindle can try imitating this mouse tail effect but they do a poor job of duplicating it without displaying the text as an image.

Another example is the Kelmscott Chaucer. This is arguably the greatest printed book ever produced. It is absolutely beautiful. It contains a ton of illustrations; many of the pages contain elaborate borders; the drop caps are all individually designed with some being outright exquisite. Even the font used for displaying the normal text was designed by William Morris and it is very fancy. This font is an important aspect of the book and any recreation that didn’t use this font would be pointless. A book like the Kelmscott Chaucer simply can't be duplicated on an ereader like the Kindle or Sony.

Another version of Chaucer that some people might want to have is William Caxton's version. Caxton was the first printer in England and if you want a copy of Caxton's Chaucer or his version of Aesop's Fables then you don't just want a reflowable computer text version. You want to see the minute variations in the letters on the printed page. You want to see all the woodblock images from the original Caxton's Aesop Fables. You want to see something that looks like a photo of the original page.

Likewise, historical scientific books like Newton's Principia or Boyle's Sceptical Chymist are far better as PDFs than simply reflowable computer text. If you want to know a synopsis of the ideas of historical science then a reader like the Kindle or Sony is fine. But, if you want to see the original text of what these authors wrote then there is nothing like viewing the originals. Computer generated text of books like these just loses something. Also, keep in mind that just because a book is a PDF doesn't mean that the text is unavailable for features like searching and annotating.

Illustrated works are really where PDF versions shine. It is possible to produce illustrated versions on current ereaders, but the illustrations are often not as large as the originals, and it takes a lot of work to produce illustrated versions so in many cases the task is never performed. When given the choice of an illustrated classic and a non-illustrated version which one would you choose? I much prefer to have versions of Charles Dickens works with all of the original illustrations. I want Jane Austen’s work with the illustrations by Hugh Thomson. If I’m going to have one version of Shakespeare then I want it to be The Pictorial Shakespeare by Charles Knight with over 1,000 images. If I have one version of the Bible then I want either the 1846 Harper's Illuminated Bible with over 1,600 engravings or a Bible with Gustave Dore's illustrations which are outright masterpieces. In fact, I want all the books Dore illustrated – Cervante's Don Quixote, Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Pardise Lost, Poe’s The Raven, Perrault’s Fairytales – these are all masterpieces. I want Dumas' The Three Musketeers with all 250 illustrations by Maurice Leloir. I want Hugo's Les Misérables with all of Emile Bayard’s the illustrations.

Some books absolutely require the illustrations to get the full impact of the book. This is especially true of children’s books, but it also applies to some adult books as well. For example, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is inseparable from the illustrations provided by Hammatt Billings. The original 1852 edition only contained 7 images but the next year an illustrated version was produced with well over a hundred images by Billings, and these images had as much to do with changing people’s perception of slavery as did the text of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The same can be said to a slightly lesser extent about the images that appeared in other books like Huckleberry Finn and the engravings found in Jules Verne’s books (he wrote a little over 50 books and these books contain over 4,000 images in total). Most of these illustrated books are already available in PDF form, and I’ve only touched on a few illustrated treasures – there are lots more that I didn’t mention.

Lastly, there are some books that aren't even illustrated and that don't contain fancy or historical fonts that are still better in a PDF form than they are in a reflowable computer text form. If you read a book like Frankenstein or Dracula then you may find the PDF version more enjoyable. In the reflowable computer text form the book’s fonts and each line of text is absolutely uniform and completely straight. In the books original printed version this is not the case. The process of printing with ink and paper causes slight variations were the ink bleeds through paper, or were the color of the paper manages to break through the ink, or where type setting causes minute shifts of height to a line of text. These subtle variations add character and help to convey the age of the material being read. They add to the atmosphere and help provide for a more enjoyable reading experience – even when the book isn’t a horror book like Dracula. For any book written prior to 1850 I’d prefer to have a PDF version.

This isn’t a knock on current ereaders. If I have trouble seeing then I want the ability to resize the text. On a PDF this may cause the page to become larger than the display area, so the current ereaders are better if you want to resize text. A small ereader that is easily carried also has its benefits in portability and comfort. An ereader capable of displaying PDFs with full sized pages would be rather large. Ultimately, I want both, but since I already have the smaller ereader I am really jonesing for the big ereader that can display PDFs.

Anyway, I just had to get this off my chest.

Last edited by Daithi; 04-21-2009 at 01:29 PM. Reason: Put book titles in italics
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Old 04-21-2009, 01:35 PM   #2
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Sounds to me like what you really want are *books*.
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Old 04-21-2009, 02:08 PM   #3
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Quote:
Originally Posted by khalleron View Post
Sounds to me like what you really want are *books*.
Haha! Good point.
I have also though about how much better it would be to have an ereader that can show a full page but the problem for me would be portability. I like being able to just put the Kindle in my backpack or, if I am at work, put it in my back pocket
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Old 04-21-2009, 02:58 PM   #4
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Originally Posted by khalleron View Post
Sounds to me like what you really want are *books*.
This is probably true.

I'd love to have a library with first editions of Dicken's books bound in leather and maybe one the Kelmscott Chaucers that was printed on vellum.

However, I also like ereaders. An ereader gives you the ability to carry an entire library in the palm of your hand, and as far as I am concerned that is just magical (literally). I can also use search functions in the ereader to find passages of text within that library in my hand. I couldn't be happier if my butt was a flashlight. Yet, I still want my ereader to provide as many benefits of the printed page as possible.
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Old 04-21-2009, 03:26 PM   #5
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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.
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Old 04-21-2009, 03:28 PM   #6
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I dont know much about it, but Hearst Publishing is talking about releasing an E-Reader that will be larger for use with their publications; newspapers and magazines.

Can anyone chime in and provide more info on this? Perhaps this could be what your are waiting for?

-Seth Williams,
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Old 04-21-2009, 03:31 PM   #7
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Old 04-21-2009, 03:43 PM   #8
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Not so fast...

Quote:
Originally Posted by Daithi View Post
...However, I also like ereaders. An ereader gives you the ability to carry an entire library in the palm of your hand, and as far as I am concerned that is just magical (literally).
I measured the text in the largest normal book in my office: NFPA, "Fire Protection Handbook", 16th edition. I get a diagonal measurement of the text on a normal page of 11-5/8 inches. I don't know about you, but the palm of my hand's about 4-1/2 inches.

If it doesn't fit, you don't get your lit, to paraphrase. At least not in a handheld form. You should probably stick to books, as someone noted previously.

My Dell X51, on the other hand, has a screen diagonal of 3-1/2 inches, which will fit in the palm of my hand (ignoring the smallish bezel).

All well and good that _you_ want a 12" screen on your custom-built, super-expensive reader. Most consumers, most of the time, need a B&W LCD or eInk screen with enough space to read reasonably sized text with in-line images that can be zoomed if need be.

Perfect is the enemy of good enough, and I'm afraid your idea of perfect would probably cause a lot of people to _not_ buy an ebook reader.

Negatively,
Jack Tingle
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Old 04-21-2009, 03:52 PM   #9
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I love everything about ebook technology. Except that I grew up reading printed books and I can't get used to reading a paragraph at a time. It doesn't feel right. That's reason number 1 that I want a large format. Reason number 2 is, I can't see it well. Unless I'm using the current gen in a 1 paragraph or less view, I'm out of luck. Actually, maybe those reasons are in reverse order.
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Old 04-21-2009, 03:59 PM   #10
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Old 04-21-2009, 04:01 PM   #11
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack Tingle View Post
Perfect is the enemy of good enough, and I'm afraid your idea of perfect would probably cause a lot of people to _not_ buy an ebook reader.

Negatively,
Jack Tingle
I have an ebook reader which works great and I would not give it up. But, as with all consumer items, I'd like to also see available a model that would suit a different need - a large format device for viewing things that aren't handled well by the current devices. If it is less portable, then so be it.
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Old 04-21-2009, 04:02 PM   #12
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack Tingle View Post
I measured the text in the largest normal book in my office: NFPA, "Fire Protection Handbook", 16th edition. I get a diagonal measurement of the text on a normal page of 11-5/8 inches. I don't know about you, but the palm of my hand's about 4-1/2 inches.

If it doesn't fit, you don't get your lit, to paraphrase. At least not in a handheld form. You should probably stick to books, as someone noted previously.

My Dell X51, on the other hand, has a screen diagonal of 3-1/2 inches, which will fit in the palm of my hand (ignoring the smallish bezel).

All well and good that _you_ want a 12" screen on your custom-built, super-expensive reader. Most consumers, most of the time, need a B&W LCD or eInk screen with enough space to read reasonably sized text with in-line images that can be zoomed if need be.

Perfect is the enemy of good enough, and I'm afraid your idea of perfect would probably cause a lot of people to _not_ buy an ebook reader.

Negatively,
Jack Tingle

I was responding to the comment about just wanting *books* and not an ereader. The use of the word literally in my comment was intended to apply to 'magical' not to the size of 'the palm of my hand'.

But since you brought it up, the size of the ereader I would like for displaying PDFs would probably be around the size of Plastic Logic device, around 10.3" I believe. This would mean that really large pages would need to be scaled down somewhat, but I could live with that if the pages still look good. I have heard that an 8.5x11 page still looks good on Plastic Logic device and also on an iRex device. The only reason I don't get an iRex device is that they are expensive and not tied into any of the major book content providers (i.e. Amazon and Sony).
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Old 04-21-2009, 04:03 PM   #13
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Yes! Oh, yes, I want a large-screen e-reader! There are some very old books on Google Books in PDF format that I have downloaded to read that would be so much easier to read on an ereader.

While it's easy to say "what you want is books" - for me it's "what I want is the information / content of the book."

For instance, I once requested one of the books I now have in PDF from GB. The book arrived at the univ lib and I could only read it there, not take it home. The book itself was very large - as thick as Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and maybe twice the height and width - making it uncomfortable to read anywhere but with it on a table and me in an uncomfortable wooden library chair.

How much nicer to read that same book with a less-than-a-pound large e-reader?

Yeah, I want books. I want what's in them. That's their raison d'être, unless they are art pieces.
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Old 04-21-2009, 04:06 PM   #14
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Quote:
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The only reason I don't get an iRex device is that they are expensive and not tied into any of the major book content providers (i.e. Amazon and Sony).
Same here.
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Old 04-21-2009, 04:12 PM   #15
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Sounds to me like what you really want are *books*.
I agree.. or you should just get yourself a touchscreen laptop and you could do much more.
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