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Comment by aristidb | Hacker News Reader

I've personally found that reading technical/scientific books on an ebook reader like the Kindle is not a joy. The main problem, for me, is very much the linearity. It's actually easier to navigate paper than the dominant ebook UI paradigms, which are very well suited to reading novels, but not much else.

If this is just a product of which software I'm using, please tell me, I'd love to use better software.

(The iPad with its big screen does work for scientific papers though, because those are usually short and rendered as a PDF that benefits from being able to see the entire page on the screen. But the reader software I've tried there is also very much linear.)

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You are correct.

I love my kindle fire. I have in the past six months read all of the G.R.R. Martin books. I have also read x < 10 non-fiction books. Took notes on all of them. Perfect for this sort of thing.

Programming and technical books are fucking terrible for this. The interface, ability to search, and translation into the real world are just not interactive enough.

They just don't match the ability to flip through the pages like in the physical world.

I read technical stuff on an iPad 4 and a Kindle DX. Both work really well (also, I use a second 24" monitor on a repositionable arm to view stuff -- OR's Safari is particularly bad on anything but a desktop computer.)

Do you study on them? I tend to look back and forth a lot when studying and books are unbeatable in this regard. You can use your fingers as bookmarks while looking at the contents. Compared to e-readers or browsing this is unbeatable (although browsing tries to get there).

You get a real sense of where the content is by the thickness of the papers. You don't have that with a browser.

I do flip back sometimes, but generally make notes separately rather than using the original pages for reference.

I find the ability to highlight sentences and paragraphs a big boost to my studying efficiency. But highlighting on books, make one mistake and you're screwed.

I use this amazing invention for highlighting things in my books, it also has a fantastic undo function. It called a pencil and costs pennies. You should try it sometime.

A pencil eraser is pretty far from fantastic when erasing from a book.

Sounds like you're redacting, not highlighting.

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