Images of technical PDFs on the Kindle DX | Hacker News Reader

Images of technical PDFs on the Kindle DX

matthewdavidwilliams.com

28 pointsmdweezer14 comments

I've got a K1 and a K2 - neither of which are suitable for technical references. We started playing with the DX at work today, reading Stephens TCP/IP Volume II (Implementation) and some Network Diagram PDFs. It's _almost_ there. The PDFs of Network Diagrams took a little long to render (about 30 seconds) and weren't quite readable on the 6pt font. Stevens was pretty good, and the page turning was reasonable. So close, but not 100% yet.

Amazon _finally_ nailed the page turning buttons - it's as good as I think it will ever get. K1 basically required a wild finger ballet to avoid turning pages - 75% of the time I ended up changing a page when picking it up anyways. K2 went overboard, and required a painful push in an awkward spot on the buttons to get the page to turn. The DX lets you pick up the device on the left side (no buttons) without worrying about changing a page, and the right side is just perfect. No accidental page turns, but not much effort to make it happen. It's very natural - kudos. Optimized for right handed people (as all books are, of course) -- Edit (all english language books, that is)

I think the DX will open up a whole new audience, but we'll require at least one more iteration before I abandon my technical bookshelf. We still need:

o A hair more resolution.

o Slightly faster page turns (though we're pretty close to where we need to be)

o Most important - some mechanism/metaphor for random page seeks - Flipping around a technical book is important, and there isn't a great way to do this on the Kindle yet.

o I don't really care about color, but I recognize for some disciplines it's an issue.

Still up in the air as to whether a tablet will manage to do this better than the Kindle. As an aside - I tend to do 50% of my reading on the iPhone Kindle App these days, saving my K1/K2 for the camping/beach/outside where they perform better in bright light (and have a great battery advantage)

The Kindle is still lacking the interactive zooming you can get on the iPhone. Interactive multi-touch zoom & pan is very powerful. So much so that in some contexts, it makes up for the inferior resolution, smaller size, and backlighting of the LCD screen. For references with intricate diagrams, this would be very useful. I find it makes for a great music "starter book." I just import PDFs of my tunes, and I can zoom in to the first two measures for normally readable notes of regular size.

Interactivity, period,is the key.

A screen technology fast enough to support a multi-touch coverflow, but with print-like resolution and a reflective screen. That would be it.

I have great hopes for the Pixel Qi screen.

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/06/02/first-hands-on-with-the...

I'd like to see some images of the Kindle DX rendering ACM papers. Specifically the two-column format.

excuse the poor lighting and crappy photo quality

http://files.getdropbox.com/u/52575/photo.jpg

It's quite readable. I've only seen one pdf that had any rendering glitches.

Does anybody know how well it renders books from Google books? For example: http://books.google.com/books/download/An_inquiry_into_the_n...

I've been holding off on an e-reader until one is good enough to display scanned google books. E-Ink reader + Google Books = the Great Library of Alexandria in my backpack. I can't wait.

pages turn about 2x slower than in a pdf that's mostly text. but it's readable.

Thanks!

It'd be great if Evernote or Dropbox could partner with a device like the Kindle.

Wow. That's actually not bad at all.

I own a Sony PRS-505 and its weaknesses are sort of shared with the K1 and K2(minus the big amazon library). I hope that Sony is still planning on competing in this space. I'd be interested to see what they would come up with.

Having said that, I am very tempted in getting a DX.

What I'd like to know is how easily you can browse (78 chars wide) code on a Kindle DX? I'd like to replace print-to-read.

Make notes/small changes on the code? Sync contents with CVS?

(I could generate PDFs of the documentation, so that isn't a problem. Code is harder to reformat for PDFs.)

Edit: Syntax

That's something I hadn't considered, but if it's good at it, it could swing me into spending the money... seconded!

annotations do not work with pdf's at the moment.

and AFAIK, the font choices available outside of pdf make showing code less attractive.

Plaintext is readable as-is, without any explicit conversion step. That being said, if you really want a code review device, you might want to look at a cheap laptop or tablet, for one basic reason: there's no direct text editing available on the Kindle, and annotations are painful to write because of the keyboard. The DX doesn't even have numbers on the main keymap, so you have to use a symbol shift to type them.

Thanks, but I read code mostly on paper today. My idea was to replace that.

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