shminux comments on Open Thread, October 16-31, 2012 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: OpenThreadGuy 16 October 2012 10:43PM

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Comment author: shminux 19 October 2012 03:07:34PM 0 points [-]
  • DRM issues: download an unencrypted backup copy, or de-RM your own.
  • Search: use desktop search that indexes unencrypted books.
  • Flip through, multi-open: yeah, it's a problem. Especially for scientific papers.
  • Visual bandwidth: I cannot relate, I read just as fast on any screen as on paper, with no noticeable eye strain. Also, audiobooks for driving.
  • Compatibility: how many old books you own are not available in digital form? Presumably, as formats change, the books get converted.

Personally, I don't buy physical books anymore, though I so have a (small) library where some old books would be hard to find online.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 19 October 2012 03:57:31PM *  2 points [-]

Visual bandwidth: I cannot relate, I read just as fast on any screen as on paper, with no noticeable eye strain.

Pictures?

Compatibility: how many old books you own are not available in digital form?

I don't know. I shall check.

ETA: I have checked. Of the last 30 books I bought (a number decided by "ok, that's enough"), 13 are available as e-books (determined by looking them up on Amazon). Every book in the sample published since 2010 was available on Kindle; only two books published before then were (2002 and 2006).

VincentYu mentioned 1DollarScan, a service for (destructively) scanning books to PDF, but transatlantic shipping costs for a thousand books, plus scanning at $3 per book make it rather expensive for me to make a serious dent in my book stacks.

Presumably, as formats change, the books get converted.

That's a large presumption. Electronic documents easily die of obsolescing formats. "If it doesn't survive, it wasn't important" is not a good rule -- ask any historian.

Comment author: drethelin 19 October 2012 08:09:44PM 0 points [-]

Pictures and graphs generally work fine on newer works but I find that charts can be pretty badly optimized on older works that have been adapted cheaply. I read comics on my iPhone but the comics app is much more optimized for this than ereaders are.

Comment author: latanius 20 October 2012 05:41:11AM 1 point [-]

Try k2pdfopt! I use it all of the time with scientific papers, with lots of formulas, and it works quite well. It practically converts the pdf to images and slices them up, outputting another pdf, but the size increase is not too significant (still usable file sizes with multiple-hundred page long books).

Comment author: drethelin 20 October 2012 05:54:27AM 0 points [-]

Thanks! This isn't actually useful to me since I read almost nothing really hardcore on my phone but it's good to know about.

Comment author: shminux 19 October 2012 04:47:40PM 0 points [-]

Visual bandwidth: I cannot relate, I read just as fast on any screen as on paper, with no noticeable eye strain.

Pictures?

What about them?

Presumably, as formats change, the books get converted.

That's a large presumption. Electronic documents easily die of obsolescing formats.

I'm wondering if this has been studied.

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