dolly Senior Member United States Joined 5792 days ago 191 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Latin
| 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. |
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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 Senior Member United States Joined 5470 days ago 114 posts - 161 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Mandarin, Japanese
| 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 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5840 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian
| 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 Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh
| 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 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5840 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian
| 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 Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh
| 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 Senior Member United States Joined 5792 days ago 191 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Latin
| 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 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5840 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian
| 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. |
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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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