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sixes_and_sevens comments on Open Thread, October 20 - 26, 2013 - Less Wrong
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Having just got a Kindle Paperwhite, I'm surprised by (a) how many neat tricks there are for getting reading material onto the device, and (b) how under-utilised and hacky this seems to be. So far I've implemented a pretty kludgey process for getting arbitrary documents / articles / blog posts onto it, but I'm pretty sure there's a lot of untapped scope for the intelligent assembly and presentation of reading material.
So, fellow infovores, what neat tips and tricks have you found for e-readers? What unlikely material do you consume on them?
k2pdfopt. It slices up pdfs so that you can read them without zooming on a much narrower screen, and since its output pdfs are essentially images, it eats everything up to (and including )very math-heavy papers, regardless of the number of columns they have. Also, it works with scanned stuff too.
(And even though the output is a bit bigger than the originals, I didn't encounter any problems with 600 page books... the result was about 50 megs tops.)
I think I set up mutt (and presumably some other software) just so that I could email files to my kindle from the command line; and I have an instapaper bookmarklet to do the same with webpages. I haven't used either very much recently, but that seems to pretty much cover my "getting content onto it" needs.
I have the same Instapaper bookmarklet. I've also set up Instapaper to forward a digest of all my Feedly content that I mark as "save for later". It turns out I only seem to use this feature for (a) incredibly long blog posts I probably shouldn't be reading at work, and (b) highly NSFW blog posts I probably shouldn't be reading at work. This makes for an interesting combination.
I'm fairly unsatisfied with the Kindle email document conversion, mainly because it doesn't do anything intelligent with document metadata. As it happens, I've been playing around with automated document metadata extraction, so I might see if I can put together a clever alternative.
Readability can be set up to send articles to it, and/or do a daily collection. Feedly can send rss feeds to it.
The user interface of the kindle is the real limitation, it fine for reading books/articles but pretty useless for going through large numbers of files.
I've been reminded of something Paul Graham said in his Dangerously Ambitious Startup Ideas essay, about how email is becoming a grossly inefficient to-do list for most people, and it could be worth instigating a whole new to-do protocol from the ground up, which had the degenerate case email equivalent of "to-do: read the following text".
So I've started looking through my emails to see what messages I receive which are essentially "read this text". It's become quite apparent that there aren't that many, and most of them are requests or suggestions to do something else online, (one point for Paul Graham), but there are a few obvious examples where this does happen, such as event itineraries, e-tickets, boarding passes, etc. These tend to be de facto documents, though, so it's not especially insightful.