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Comment by bathory | Hacker News Reader

My biggest gripe with this bundle is that they are all digital. I'd rather have less books but then in a printed format. I have noticed that I can't concentrate on reading books when they are presented to me on my computer screen. I do have a kindle (1st or 2nd generation) and that device doesn't support PDF well, furthermore it is rather slow. It works fine for regular books though, where I don't have to flip through chapters back and forth often.

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I purchase a bunch of technical books in digital format, but I always skip books which are not DRM-free and don't deliver at least PDF and EPUB formats.

It is true that code examples look broken at times, but most of the times turning the kindle to landscape orientation does the trick.

You should avoid feeding PDFs to your Kindle, since they only look good on a PC or on a 4:3 tablet (ex. iPad or Galaxy Tab S2), although, after reading a chapter on your Kindle, it is positive to skim through the PDF to get a grasp of the details you might have missed.

As a Kindle owner, the format you really want is .MOBI (or .EPUB converted with kindlegen[1] and trimmed down with kindlestrip[2]).

Most .MOBIs you'll encounter are actually conversions from .EPUB with kindlegen, so you should trim them down with kindlestrip too.

Finally, if you're a Kindle power user, then you should give Calibre[3] a try to convert other formats to .MOBI, but be warned that the conversion is a hit-or-miss.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000765211

[2] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/kindlestrip/

[3] https://calibre-ebook.com/

My problem with PDF technical books is that they are typically formatted for 8.5x11 or A4 paper, typically with a really huge margin. I wish that there was something in the PDF spec to allow for multiple sizes to be specified in a single file, so that the same file can be used for printing as well as viewing on a 6 inch reader.

It sounds like what you're really asking for is a proper e-book format, like EPUB. PDF is not an e-book format, it's a presentation format, for print-equivalent documents. They aren't interchangeable.

Right, but the problem with EPUB and Mobi is that I haven't really seen technical books done well with them, with various tables, diagrams, charts, etc. These are presented much better when they have a human eye lay them out on the page.

That's where a multi-format PDF would come in handy -- you could still have a human editor lay out the pages for 2 or 3 different page sizes, and then the reader would pick the appropriate one (given the constraints of the reader device and font size).

Have you looked at many O'reilly, Pragmatic Programmers, or Apress books? I own a library of over a thousand titles from those publishers and generally any ePub created in the past 3-4yrs from them is top notch.

I just bought this bundle, which is all O'reilly, so I'm assuming the ePub's are from them. Was looking at the Emacs one, and so far not too bad. But there are still issues, such as I came across a table that had the headers line at the bottom of one page, and the rest of the table on the next page. Things like this, you can probably put hits / rules in the ePub file for, but it still benefits more from having a human do the layout.

I already own that ePub so I'll check it on my end to see if it's specific to the Humble Bumble version. Which table should I check? Also, which reader are you using out of curiosity?

I tried it using Google play books, and also FBreader. The specific table depends on the screen size, font, orientation, etc. In my case, it was one of the tables in the preface, when viewing portrait mode on my phone. When bringing it up on my tablet, the same effect could be seen on any other table that happens to start at the end of the page.

You could get close to this by just using multiple PDFs. However, no one seems to do this (@haskellbook is the only exception I can think of), so perhaps editors feel it's not worth the extra time and effort.

I looked at a few technical books I have and none of them are in 8.5x11 or A4 sizes. Most books I have are much smaller than that, and more easily handled.

PDF spec actually supports different page sizes (crop box, trim box, bleed box, media box, etc) for different pages. But it seems like what you what is essentially two separate PDFs with different page sizes combined together, and the reader picks one based on the viewport. I'm not sure PDF spec natively supports that, but PDF does support JavaScript and I can imagine JavaScript querying the viewport and then hiding/showing pages.

While not really related to specifying multiple sizes, PDFs do have the concept of an artbox, which could be used by the PDF author to indicate the area of the page that actually contains content.

A useful feature of a PDF reader on these devices could be to display only this area with a smaller, perhaps user defined, margin.

This at least would fix the 'huge margin' problem.

On Android I use Orion Viewer that handles margins effortlessly, and columns decently.

I suspect you are asking for them to be written in HTML.

It'd be hard to get even one physical book online for $1, let alone several of them.

As long as I have two screens, I've learned to like digital textbooks. It's hard to ctrl+f on a piece of paper.

In the past, they've offered bundles with print copies if you pay at least $xx (40-50, IIRC). Not all the books though, usually some subset of the books available.

Just a third (or fourth) tier in the scheme they already use.

There are several problems with ebook textbooks. I have problems concentrating with them too. But also, I need to use my computer while I read the textbook. I find it much easier to have the book on the desk and the thing I'm doing on the screen.

The typesetting and layout of textbooks is also very important. It's not just free flowing text. This means they are simple not compatible with the screen sizes of computers or ebook readers.

The ability to flip through a book is surely one of the best features of the format. When I'm familiar with a textbook I can find the page I want in seconds based on some vague intuition about where it will be (for some textbooks I can do this with my eyes closed). I'm not aware of any electronic formats that offers such fast random access.

Would a tablet with the PDF on your desk be an acceptable compromise? That's what I tend to do. You can 'flip through' in iBooks by either using the text search, or just hopping over to the contents/notes/bookmarks. It can be pretty effective once you get used to it.

You could also pay a relatively small amount to get the PDFs printed and spiral-bound at a print shop. That solves your problem of free-flowing text, plus they lay flat, which is a godsend.

I've gone back and forth. I wanted digital books, but frankly they're terrible on Kindle--especially languages like Python because of word-wrapping. Kindles are also awful at skimming or thumbing through. But physical books I don't always have with me at work/home and it's hard to dig them out when you need them.

I've found that I really like buying digital books, but using my iPad or Kindle computer app to read coding books because the formatting is better. Even if you don't copy/paste, it's easier to type in code if it's in the window next to you instead of looking down (yeah, I can type without looking at the keyboard, but I have more trouble in an IDE when I have to match parens and quotes, deal with autocomplete and other syntax things like semicolons).

It's a humble bundle so it would have been unusual for print books. The manufacturing cost is quite high for print on demand vs essentially free for digital download.

But I am with you on the print books. I've spend many thousands of dollars building up my home CS library. Nothing helps me learn better than stepping away from the screens and reading paper in a comfortable chair!

I bought an ipad mini for safari testing (grrr) and it turned out to be my favourite way to read computer books.

Screen is adequately large and the DPI is so high that they look great, it turned out to be a useful device.

How is the backlight affecting your eyes? I ended up buying a Kindle because reading on an iPad was straining my eyes too much, specially at bedtime.

Turning brightness ridiculously low helps (me).

Not sure which ebook reader you use but in Play Book there's "Night Light" which gives that f.lux-like effect. Definitely not as good as e-ink but it helps a little.

In daylight its fine and at night I just turn down brightness.

These are all offered in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI formats. The MOBI should work fine on your older Kindle, and EPUB works great on third-party ebook apps. PDF should look good on a modern tablet.

This bundle includes the books in .mobi format which might be supported better on your kindle than pdfs.

For me, digital is absolutely necessary for any technical or academic book. I have to be able to search in it. However, I am not a fan of PDF because it is very inflexible in its presentation, and it is hard to transform into other formats. I prefer a web document or even just plain text.

I'm the kind of guy who used to print out articles from the web to read and now I can't concentrate while reading a physical book. I think the constant visual reminder of how much I have left to read bothers me for some reason.

Slightly on-topic: so what ebook readers (kindle, nook, bookeen, icarus, boox, kobo, sony, etc) can be used to _comfortably_ browse a PDF?

I would have liked a way to register them with my existing O'Reilly account so they showed up there, but PDF is OK.

I agree for small screens -- reading anything on my laptop is painful -- but reading on a 32"-40" 4K screen, where you can have two pages shown in full at a larger-than-life size, makes a huge difference. I still prefer paper overall, but I no longer mind digital.

I would prefer digital but in a way where I downloaded just one pdf file. Searching across multiple pdfs is pretty broken for me. If people have any tips to share that work on Windows / Linux I would appreciate it.

You could join the Pdf files, but honestly, one file of different books containing several hundred pages each sounds impractical.

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