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Comment by alexland | Hacker News Reader

I feel the complete opposite for all of the college textbooks I've used (although all of my textbooks are filled with problems rather than readings).

Using a laptop or e-reader to read textbooks is awesome for a couple of reasons. First off, having multiple textbooks doesn't weigh anything, and I can carry them around at all times. Secondly, when doing assignments and the like, I can bookmark the answer section in the back, and flip back and forth between questions and answers arguably faster than I could with a paper book. Finally, the best part of electronic books is the ability to search through it. Every definition in the book is a Ctrl+F away.

So maybe reading books electronically isn't as great when you're doing a lot of actual reading, but in my experience using more math/science textbooks, electronic wins out every time.

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I agree textbooks on a laptop are really great - no heavy books, and Ctrl+F works really well. I can't imagine they work very well on e-readers though - it seems like flipping through pages would be slow, and ctrl+f would be pretty difficult without a real keyboard.

The original e-ink Kindle had a real keyboard. It's a little less awkward than the e-ink Nook which used (uses?) a small LCD touchscreen keyboard.

Not exactly an e-reader, but I read my textbooks on a Nexus 7 most of the time. I use Moon+ Reader, and the search and bookmarking features are phenomenal.

When I am on a desktop or notebook computer, I use either Evince or Preview, depending on the platform I am using. I would say Moon+ provides an experience equal to that of Evince, and definitely better than Preview, at least for the purposes of being an ebook reader.

You need to have multiple copies open at the same time if you want to refer to different parts at the same time.

Ctrl+f is great, but you end up losing the part of the book you were at before you started searching. So basically I needed to have 4 copies open at a time. 3 for different parts of the book I needed to refer to and one for searching. This made the actual size of the text way too small on a laptop screen.

Some of the problems could probably be solved with bookmarking software, but then you have to remember where each bookmark is instead of glancing at it.

Not necessarily. I use the PDF-reader on OSX called Skim and it lets me bookmark the current page I'm on. Then I can just keep clicking the bookmark menu item and switching to the page I need. Only one copy. Each bookmark can have a label. Not too bad.

Potentially even more useful is the split view. Unfortunately, it only does horizontal splits, and only two at a time. I need to search again sometime for a reader with vertical splits, as horizontal splits are mostly useless on a little 11" screen.

Though Skim is open source...

I also use Skim, it works really well. A pretty cool feature is the back and forward buttons, that hold your page if you skip through large chunks. For example, if I use the table of contents (Cmd + Shift + T) to go to the answers section, I can press back to get back to the question I was on. Then forward brings me to the answers once again.

That's basically my textbook workflow 90% of the time.

That works too! I really like using Skim. Without it, I would definitely not like reading/doing problems from my textbooks.

> You need to have multiple copies open at the same time if you want to refer to different parts at the same time.

That's true but that's a huge advantage to ebooks. Having two copies of the book open, one for the "Diagram on page 240." Can't do that with a book.

IIRC Firefox's built-in PDF viewer has decent integration with the browser back button, so you can search for text, read it, then press the back button on your mouse (or two-finger-swipe if you like making things complicated ;-)) to return to your previous page.

I've managed to accommodate the need for multiple pages open at once by having multiple windows with multiple tabs.

This works much better for me than paper books due to freeing up desk space and not requiring multiple purchases of a paper text.

I use OS X though, so I have a convenient graphical window switching tool which shows me all the windows of a particular app, rather than a list of window names. Perhaps the experience is different for Windows and Linux users?

On the iPad, I make extensive use of notes, bookmarks and different coloured highlights. In some cases I'll use e.g.: yellow for definitions, blue for examples, pink for caveats. In other cases I'll use yellow for topic A, pink for topic B, etc. Thus the always-visible index of notes gives me twice as much information!

You can't easily get the same utility out of a paper book.

So true about math/science books. I think they work for a lot of fiction reading too, you just have to set adaptive brightness or change to a darker background to avoid strain.

My thoughts exactly. Ctrl+F was priceless for classes I didn't care about and just wanted to quickly find the quiz answers or whatever.

This. And i use ctrl c. Boom two copies of the text book one for the problem page, one for referencing.

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