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Comment by askedrelic | Hacker News Reader

Ebooks :(

For personal use, this would be fine, but it's much easier to share paper books at work.

I find that I simply can't use ebooks. Sitting and reading on a computer monitor for long periods of time is just too much strain on my eyes. Funny enough that I don't have as much issue coding all day or reading hackernews.. but if I sit and try to read multi-page articles or ebooks it just seems impossible to do if it isn't on paper.

This is the one thing that tempts me into a Kindle. I wouldn't want to replace my existing books (or stop purchasing new books when available), but an increasing amount of 'long form' content I am interested in seems to be in digital-only format... and self-printing is prohibitively expensive.

Try rotating one of your monitors either by buying a mount from monoprice or going to home depot and hacking something together(i did the latter) reading pdfs and ebooks has been way better, I considered(and had purchased) an ipad to read on, i couldn't justify the larger kindle price. Rotating my monitor for $13(though it is fixed, but reversible(with a screwdriver) made it much easier to live with.

http://imgur.com/dk8q8.jpg

Could you explain what exactly you hacked together to rotate your monitor like that? I was thinking of purchasing a dual monitor mount that allows this configuration, but would rather hack something together for the time being.

Sure, I purchased a bag of #8-32 x 1/2" zinc slot headed bolts, they included the nuts as well.

I also purchased 30 #8 washers(wasn't sure how many i'd need to get the vesa threaded holes tight with the 1/2" long bolt.)

I also purchased a flat 1/8" thick 2" wide by 36" piece of aluminum. I cut it into 3 pieces, used two, drilled 4 holes in each, made those holes slightly larger than the bolt (for wiggle room before tightening down as i didn't measure as well as I should have). I used aluminum even though it was more expensive vs steel because I know drilling steel is a pain in the ass.

I used a piece of paper for the vesa mount hole template, I took the sheet of paper, aligned the center of two vesa mount holes with one of the edges of the paper and marked those with a line (intersect the holes with the edge of the paper and the two lines, that make sense?), the other two i just used a pencil and poked a hole through while laying the paper on the monitor back. I again used the slightly larger drill bit so I didn't have to be ultra precise.

Since I didn't modify the stand at all I can always go back to the standard orientation, it'd take maybe 3 minutes to put it back. Using my method I retained the default stand and have some tilt capability as well.

My marvel of human engineering(the back of the monitor w/ the aluminum attached) http://imgur.com/ZeHvP.jpg

edit: fixed unclosed parenthesis

Same here, I can spend all day working on a computer, but reading on a computer monitor tires my eyes out. I picked up the new standard size kindle, and while it does not do well at all with pdfs, it does a great job with ebooks. The Oreilly ebooks can be downloaded directly in mobi format, so they work very well with the kindle. Overall I've been very happy with reading ebooks on the kindle, and with the $139 price tag, you really can't go wrong. I'm still looking for a good pdf device, but unfortunately the ipad is the best device I've seen yet for pdfs, but its price tag is way too high for me. The ipad does a surprisingly good job of zooming in on columns, something I haven't seen anything else handle well.

I have the smaller kindle and I've been pleasantly surprised by the number of technical ebooks that read nicely on it (they have to be .mobi though as pdf are not nearly as pleasant). I've also found that I now prefer ebooks on my laptop for any exercise heavy reading. For example right now I have half my screen devoted to emacs+slime and the other have to 'land of lisp', I've found this much better than trying to balance a print book and a laptop. I still need/prefer print books in certain situations, but I'm happy with the shelf space this saves. Also don't forget that you permanently have multi-format, drm-free access to O'Reilly ebooks.

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