Science/textbooks on kindle

leha · 11-22-2007, 10:00 PM

Hi,

By any chance did anybody try to buy some science/textbooks or say programming books from Amazon for kindle? The collection of scientific books for kindle is quite big something like 16k what I am interested in is how they are formatted. Does Amazon just sell a "pdf" copy of printed edition or was layout changed to fit small screen? The later seems to be too difficult to do but the former means that most of these scientific books are unreadable on kindle.

PS: I have sony prs500 and reading textbooks on such small screen is quite difficult unless you do some tricks.

JSWolf · 11-22-2007, 10:55 PM

To be honest, I don't think any of the current eink readers are good enough for reading text books. I (IMHO) would not bother with them until such time as a eink device that is better suited to text books appear.

CCDMan · 11-22-2007, 11:26 PM

Yeah, graphics are critical and for that we need a slightly bigger screen, a higher res screen, and at least more grayscale and possibly color. It will be a while...

leha · 11-23-2007, 01:21 AM

I agree that 800x600 is a little too small to read a textbook but disagree that it is impossible. Irex iliad is pretty good for this purpose not only it is 1024x768 but also it has 16 lvl grayscale. Hell, my laptop has 1024 screen and you dont really need colors for technical literature. Even sony prs is ok as long as you can delete all margins and fonts are not too small (obviously you have to read half a page at time).
In any case question still is if amazon reformatted its books for them to be more readable on a smallish screen.

11-22-2007, 10:00 PM	#1
leha Member Posts: 14 Karma: 10 Join Date: Nov 2006 Device: prs-500	Science/textbooks on kindle Hi, By any chance did anybody try to buy some science/textbooks or say programming books from Amazon for kindle? The collection of scientific books for kindle is quite big something like 16k what I am interested in is how they are formatted. Does Amazon just sell a "pdf" copy of printed edition or was layout changed to fit small screen? The later seems to be too difficult to do but the former means that most of these scientific books are unreadable on kindle. PS: I have sony prs500 and reading textbooks on such small screen is quite difficult unless you do some tricks.

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11-22-2007, 10:55 PM	#2
JSWolf Resident Curmudgeon Posts: 73,897 Karma: 128597114 Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Roslindale, Massachusetts Device: Kobo Libra 2, Kobo Aura H2O, PRS-650, PRS-T1, nook STR, PW3	To be honest, I don't think any of the current eink readers are good enough for reading text books. I (IMHO) would not bother with them until such time as a eink device that is better suited to text books appear.

11-22-2007, 11:26 PM	#3
CCDMan *** Posts: 335 Karma: 5759 Join Date: Mar 2006 Device: ***	Yeah, graphics are critical and for that we need a slightly bigger screen, a higher res screen, and at least more grayscale and possibly color. It will be a while...

11-23-2007, 01:21 AM	#4
leha Member Posts: 14 Karma: 10 Join Date: Nov 2006 Device: prs-500	I agree that 800x600 is a little too small to read a textbook but disagree that it is impossible. Irex iliad is pretty good for this purpose not only it is 1024x768 but also it has 16 lvl grayscale. Hell, my laptop has 1024 screen and you dont really need colors for technical literature. Even sony prs is ok as long as you can delete all margins and fonts are not too small (obviously you have to read half a page at time). In any case question still is if amazon reformatted its books for them to be more readable on a smallish screen.

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