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Comment by mastry | Hacker News Reader

The Kindle app on iPad is no better for technical books. Images are low resolution and mathematical formulas are frequently displayed incorrectly. I only buy tech books now if I can get them in unlocked PDF format. I import those into iBooks and the results are very good.

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Ah sorry, I omitted some details in my tentative "plan" - I was not going to use the Kindle app to read technical books on iPad, but use the iPad along with something like a Safari Books Online subscription. At least on my laptop I have been fairly happy with the SBO formatting so I am hoping it might work well on iPad as well for a portable reading and note-taking setup.

Make sure you take a look at something like a Chromebook Flip too. Bit cheaper and touch heavier, but bit larger and you get a physical keyboard etc.

I haven't actually bought one yet but if been using another laptop with Dane dude 1080p screen and it works well. Plus chromebook is pretty caoable as a secondary device so its relatively good value proposition.

Thanks for the tip, I'll definitely check it out. Do you know if the Chromebook touchscreen works decently well for writing/note taking with a stylus? Is it precise enough? I was considering the iPad Pro with Apple Pencil largely because it seems great for precise handwritten note taking.

Definitely not good for handwriting from brief time I had with the device, the iPad Pro would be a good bet, or a surface if you can use Windows.

Apparently Samsung's Chromebook Pro replacement will have a stylus though, so that should be out in 2018 if you can wait.

Current Chromebook Plus/Pro already have a stylus.

SBO is OK for books that don't have many formulae. For those that do, I've found they usually have at least a few formulae that are illegible due to overlapping text, missing unicode or other related issues.

I don't understand why they can't fix this, at least for O'Reilly content. Even if they choose to use HTML/epub for SBO, why not generate the graphical version of the equations using the same technique used for the PDF versions?

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