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EBook Reader: Kindle etc. You use it?

  Tags: e-book | Software
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33 messages over 5 pages: 1 24 5  Next >>
dolly
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United States
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 Message 17 of 33
02 March 2010 at 12:30pm | IP Logged 
Kubelek wrote:
1 Has anybody tried using a parallel novel, as used in LR, on his device?

2 Are all of these devices as controlling as Kindle? Are there any that basically let me put whatever I want on them, without worrying about coast guard deleting my files?

3 Are there any pop-up dictionaries for Japanese that I could use?

It's too bad that devices that can handle pdfs are not that great.

Have you considered a new iPad for pdfs? I'm sure the battery life will not be quite as good as e-ink, but it shouldn't have any problems displaying them correctly.
The kindle 2 can read PDFs natively but the print is kind of small, so I convert the documents instead (it's very easy) and they display just fine.


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genini1
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 Message 18 of 33
03 March 2010 at 4:55am | IP Logged 
You can also subscribe to newspapers in foreign languages and there is a magazine subscription for something called Wirtschafts Woche I don't know what it's about but it's a German periodical.
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cordelia0507
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United Kingdom
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 Message 19 of 33
13 March 2010 at 6:06pm | IP Logged 
Irex has a new model now, that's better than the one mentioned here.

It's called DS800 or something like that. It has a very big screen, hand writing recognition and navigation with a stylo. Check it on their website.

In the US it is in sale at a shop called "Best Buy" for about 350-400 USD (forgotten exactly). However the Euro price is EUR 499 or £ 430
What a ripoff ! Why should we pay so much more?
The company is Dutch.

This is the ultimate model though - the one to get if you are serious and want to get one that can do everything you want technically, and is also 100% open format (no DRM - copyright schemes on it).

I am just about to buy one.


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Cainntear
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Scotland
linguafrankly.blogsp
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 Message 20 of 33
13 March 2010 at 7:43pm | IP Logged 
I've just bought an Elonex 511eb from Waterstone's for £129. It's a rebadged Far Eastern unit -- Borders Books had ordered a job lot and went under, so Waterstone's swiped the lot at a bargain price.

It handles the usual formats, but doesn't have anything fancy like interactive dictionaries, which is a shame.

It's also not so good for my Open University texts -- the PDF viewer shrinks the whole page so that the width fits in the (very small) screen, and it takes a long time to render some of the more complicated pages...
...but then again PDF is a stupid format for eBooks, and if you can avoid it, you'll be alright.


I'm currently going through the process of finding various classics on-line (Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Cervantes etc), as well as various dictionaries and grammar texts.

It can be hit and miss (the BBC's Welsh grammar comes out just big enough to read and no more, for example) but I bought it because I've been slacking off on the university work because of the inconvenience of carrying all the book around with me, and once I've got a good proportion of my materials in one place, I won't have that excuse any more...!
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cordelia0507
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 Message 21 of 33
13 March 2010 at 10:41pm | IP Logged 
Cainttear, there is plenty of scope for changing the formats, font sizes and cutting the white spaces on the side off your books.

It is possible to make sure you get the best possible fit with the screen size that you have, with minimum wasted space and maximum sized letters.

If you are going to spend a lot of time on the reader it's defintely worth investigating.

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Cainntear
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 Message 22 of 33
14 March 2010 at 1:15pm | IP Logged 
The thing is that some books can't be reflowed due to table layouts. The Welsh grammar I've got is formatted as a single column that fills the page width. If I zoom, I have to scroll back and forward between the left and right of the page, but obviously that's too slow.

The OU books can be zoomed because they're normally in columns (but with some boxouts that cross column boundaries), but I've yet to see any PDF reader in an eBook or on a computer that makes it easy to go from the bottom of one column to the top of the next.

As I say, PDF is very poorly suited to eBooks -- it's designed to be printed on paper.
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dolly
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 Message 23 of 33
24 March 2010 at 10:45pm | IP Logged 
An Italian-English dictionary for kindle has just been released (March 22, 2010).

BARRON'S Italian English DICTIONARY

While reading a text, move the cursor to a word that you don't know and get the definition at the bottom of the page.


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cordelia0507
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 Message 24 of 33
28 March 2010 at 9:50am | IP Logged 
Cainntear wrote:
The thing is that some books can't be reflowed due to table layouts. The Welsh grammar I've got is formatted as a single column that fills the page width. If I zoom, I have to scroll back and forward between the left and right of the page, but obviously that's too slow.

The OU books can be zoomed because they're normally in columns (but with some boxouts that cross column boundaries), but I've yet to see any PDF reader in an eBook or on a computer that makes it easy to go from the bottom of one column to the top of the next.

As I say, PDF is very poorly suited to eBooks -- it's designed to be printed on paper.


I bought a book a while back which was in a DRM (copyrighted) format, epub. I wanted to change it to PDF or something open but it was IMPOSSIBLE to do it. It was encrypted in such a way that none of the ripping software worked. After a few hours working on it I gave up in disgust and decided not to read that particular book. The reason I wanted to rip it was so I could change the layout to suit parallel reading (for a parallel text in Russian.)






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