June 22, 2011 at 4:14 pm
I have an increasing amount of whitepapers to read with the start of a new job.
as i work 11 hour days at the moment, i dont want to sit infront of a pc reading white papers when i get home.
Dont want a mountain of papers beside my bed either.
Anyone use a kindle for whitepapers and technical books?
Do you find it usefull or is it limited for use with just novels?
I often flick between chapters and pages and referr back to previous chapters in a book. how well does it accomodate that?
June 23, 2011 at 12:41 am
I am currently using the kindle 2 to read books.
personally speaking, I think it is very convenient for the readers.
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June 23, 2011 at 1:07 pm
never used a kindle, but i have a few tech books on my ipad 2 and it's very nice
July 3, 2011 at 2:53 am
I use my kindle for tech books, and reading white papers.
It works best for mobi techbooks, and .doc white papers (as they can be converted to Kindle format by Amazon). You can read PDF's on it, but they aren't particularly easy to read.
Last one I read was the FastTrack Datawarehousing whitepaper. Really easy to read, and it's conversion to Kindleformat even took the pictures.
I like kindle for Whitepapers (tree-friendly too!)
July 3, 2011 at 4:05 am
didnt know i could convert word docs to kindle format. ive been converting them to pdf which is ok, but lacks the text sizing of the kindle format.
I will investigate how to convert from doc to kindle format, thanks!
July 3, 2011 at 4:09 am
If you email them to <youraddr>@free.kindle.com, amazon will convert them and send them to your kindle.
Pretty cool really. 🙂
January 1, 2012 at 12:12 pm
To follow up on this, i have the kindle a few months now. I love it and dont leave home without it.
Its awesome for reading novels but it sucks for technical books and most white papers.
It sucks for 3reasons:
1. It does not have a useful index or table of contents section for a book so you can quickly search for a topic. it can do a word search on a book, but this can turn up thousands of results, depending on the word you are searching for and so is not very useful.
2. It sucks at displaying tables. Its a basic html viewer at heart, so i dont know why it cannot render tables better. They almost always suck. I have tried various formats ( doc, docx, htm, html etc etc). HTML docs seem to render slightly better but not a huge amount.
3. It cannot display graphs at all.
Its fine for short white papers with little/no tables and graphs but anything else tasks it too much.
In short, if you want something for holding your library of books for recreational reading, the kindle is for you. if you want something for reading technical and reference books, id avoid it and take something like an iPad.
January 3, 2012 at 7:26 am
Winston,
I Think the problem may be with the books sucking, not the Kindle. I recently finished a textbook. It had both a TOC broken down to chapters and subsections with links, and an index with links.
The book also contained tables and graphs. All of them displayed fine.
Perhaps the authors/Kindle version preparers of your books just haven't put in the effort to make use of the Kindle format to it's fullest?
winston Smith (1/1/2012)
To follow up on this, i have the kindle a few months now. I love it and dont leave home without it.Its awesome for reading novels but it sucks for technical books and most white papers.
It sucks for 3reasons:
1. It does not have a useful index or table of contents section for a book so you can quickly search for a topic. it can do a word search on a book, but this can turn up thousands of results, depending on the word you are searching for and so is not very useful.
2. It sucks at displaying tables. Its a basic html viewer at heart, so i dont know why it cannot render tables better. They almost always suck. I have tried various formats ( doc, docx, htm, html etc etc). HTML docs seem to render slightly better but not a huge amount.
3. It cannot display graphs at all.
Its fine for short white papers with little/no tables and graphs but anything else tasks it too much.
In short, if you want something for holding your library of books for recreational reading, the kindle is for you. if you want something for reading technical and reference books, id avoid it and take something like an iPad.
January 3, 2012 at 8:21 am
thats a fair point.
It shouldnt be difficult, as kindle is just a html reader really. have the TOC as links and format the doc in HTML and your golden. publishers are not doing that though.
until they do, kindle will be recreational only for me.
January 3, 2012 at 8:55 am
Not sure about technical books, but in terms of the TOC, I use the Kindle app on my iPhone and there is a menu that can drop me to the TOC at any time.
The other thing I find myself doing is highlighting items, or dogearing the pages. That's easy to do. Search is meh, as you mentioned, because it returns so many items.
I had a Kindle 1 and I know it had issues with images/tables/code. Same for Kindle app. No idea of the Kindle Fire does a better job, but I suspect that it comes down to any work done by the publishers in formatting. I did find I could pick an image and have it become the whole page on my phone/iPad, and then I can zoom in.
I might recommend going with a Fire instead of a Kindle, mainly because of the additional capabilities to handle things like HTML items better. That being said, it's an LCD screen, and lower batter life, than the eInk device.
I'll ask a couple people I know with Fires/Kindles to comment.
January 3, 2012 at 9:04 am
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (1/3/2012)
I might recommend going with a Fire instead of a Kindle, mainly because of the additional capabilities to handle things like HTML items better. That being said, it's an LCD screen, and lower batter life, than the eInk device.
I'll ask a couple people I know with Fires/Kindles to comment.
I got the kindle over a tablet due to the ease at which you can read e-ink.
I have done a bit of reading on a tablet before, and it has the same effect on your eyes as a computer monitor, so just is not suited to reading a book, at least IMO.
Battery life of the kindle is nice also! use it for 1-2 hours per day and get a month out of it!
January 3, 2012 at 9:07 am
FYI, if you're not in too much of a hurry, give it a few days. Asked a few people to comment on their experiences. Not sure they'll do it today.
January 3, 2012 at 9:08 am
winston Smith (1/3/2012)
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (1/3/2012)
I might recommend going with a Fire instead of a Kindle, mainly because of the additional capabilities to handle things like HTML items better. That being said, it's an LCD screen, and lower batter life, than the eInk device.
I'll ask a couple people I know with Fires/Kindles to comment.
I got the kindle over a tablet due to the ease at which you can read e-ink.
I have done a bit of reading on a tablet before, and it has the same effect on your eyes as a computer monitor, so just is not suited to reading a book, at least IMO.
Battery life of the kindle is nice also! use it for 1-2 hours per day and get a month out of it!
I do miss the battery, but I carry a few spares for the iPhone, so not a big deal.
I really worried about moving to the phone when my Kindle was destroyed, however I found that it wasn't that big a deal. I switched to reading white text on a black background and find myself lost in the story most of the time and I don't notice the device. I spent 1/5-2 hours reading the Steve Jobs autobio yesterday and it was very relaxing.
January 3, 2012 at 9:11 am
The issue I have with the Kindle and technical books/white papers is the same thing I have with actual paper, I can't copy & paste really quickly into a query window when I find something cool.
Other than that, I use it more than I use paper now. I also have the Kindle App on my table and my phone. I don't use it on either device much because I really do prefer reading with the Kindle (extremely light, big enough screen, great stuff). Some pictures can be overly fuzzy on the Kindle and tables do come out wonky sometimes. I like the search option, even though you get a lot of results because my memory sucks, so I have to look stuff up a lot.
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January 4, 2012 at 8:21 am
NHaslam (7/3/2011)
If you email them to <youraddr>@free.kindle.com, amazon will convert them and send them to your kindle.Pretty cool really. 🙂
Does that convert from PDF / Word format to Kindle format? I'm in UK and if I email a PDF to my username@kindle.com email a get a pdf on my kindle.
There are a few free PDF -> mobi converters though . . . .
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