Ask Slashdot: Ebook Reader for Scientific Papers?

An anonymous reader writes "I love the idea of getting an ebook reader primarily for reading research journal papers. However I've heard bad things about the handling of PDFs on the major ones. I don't particularly care for color, but having an e-ink display and the ability to handle PDF/PS docs without conversion would be a major plus. I'd even be open to a hacked Kindle running Linux if it were practical. Does any good solution exist?" A few months ago I found the Asus Eee Note (some folks even figured out how the software works and got it to run other Qt apps), but my hopes were dashed when I learned they had killed it before it even arrived in the U.S. It seems right now that this particular niche is not being served: or is it?

Comments

Kindle DX

[metageek]

Kindle DX and read the articles sideways

Re:Kindle DX

[mark-t]

Two words describe a problem with that: vertical panning... although I'm not so lazy that I'm unwilling to pan a page, it's still roughly as detaching from the experience of actually absorbing the content as flipping a physical page is, and creates a discontinuous impression of a single page that would otherwise have been seamless if you could see it all at once.

Simply put, for some types of content, you need to see a whole page at a time... and you need it to be presented large enough that you will be able to see all the text clearly.

The DX doesn't do that.

Re:Kindle DX

[ynp7]

You should be able to follow the links. The 3rd gen Kindles have a Webkit-based browser built in. I've never tried a PDF, but it certainly works for books in Amazon's Mobi format, so it should work with PDF as well.

Don't use a default Kindle

[JoshuaZ]

I don't have much experience with different e-readers. Just noting that from my personal experience with the Kindle's default handling of PDFs it isn't very good for scientific papers. Diagrams especially don't come out well, and occasionally stuff isn't rendered correctly (although that issue has become nearly non-existent with the new Kindles and the upgrades. I don't know what they did but presumably improved stuff somewhere). I have friends who have had good experiences with the iPad, and for diagrams it is quite nice. You can easily rotate them or zoom in or out using a very intuitive interface.

Re:Don't use a default Kindle

[artor3]

I own a Kindle (2e) and love it, but I agree with the above sentiment. When it comes down to it, e-ink in general isn't very good for any paper with lots of diagrams or schematics. You want something that can pan and zoom without refreshing the screen, which means you want an LCD screen. So far I haven't heard of any top notch Android tablets, so that leaves the iPad as the frontrunner for this particular application.

What's wrong with the Kindle?

[questioner]

I've had no issues with PDFs on the Kindle, whether the DX (which is the right form factor), or the 3 (which is conveniently portable). It's not a perfect solution, but it works.

IMO, the optimal solution would be a hybrid display (like Pixel Qi make), a form factor halfway between the DX and the 3 (i.e. roughly the screen size of a normal book), and running an Android OS so apps can be written to support things like DJVU. I had high hopes for the Adam (Notion Ink, http://www.notionink.com/), but they're a little too ... grungy ... for me to be willing to spend $600 on.

Re:What's wrong with the Kindle?

[OFnow]

Somehow for me the Kindle DX is a terrible pdf reader. The fonts that look sensible on paper just look really light on Kindle. And the search on Kindle is horrible: AFAICT no partial word search no control of case-match/not and so on. Even translating the source to an ebook format only helps with the character visibility (while kind of making the really long tables in the doc I want on Kindle into a mess), using Calibre as the transformer.

Been reading a few books a day for a week now, recovering from a small injury, and find Kindle DX great for books...

Nook Color handles 99% of my PDFs

[introp]

The built-in PDF reader on the Nook Color is decent. It drains the battery faster (maybe 2x or 3x?) than reading epub files but is still quite usable. I've only ever had trouble with one PDF: there was one page with a TON of overlaid vector images and it wouldn't render correctly; all pages after that page were missing images entirely. Otherwise it's been a fine machine.

Re:Nook Color handles 99% of my PDFs

[blackest_k]

Calibre seems pretty good at format shifting pdf to epub which is a lot less of a strain for an ereader , android device to cope with.

I haven't tried calibre on complicated pdfs but so far it has handled everything i have given it.

Re:Nook Color handles 99% of my PDFs

[cowboy76Spain]

I have used it; it works well when there are no headers or footers. But with heathers / foothers (i.e., all technical manuals), the headers get in the text and disrupt it.

Anyone has tried some software that does not have this problem?

Re:Nook Color handles 99% of my PDFs

[akpoff]

I bought the Nook Color for the same reason. The Nook Color PDF reader is a very capable viewer. I didn't want the Nook version of Android so I bought one that was already rooted with CyanogenMod.

I'm mostly happy with it for reading PDFs. Like any tablet-sized reader you will have to pan. You can view the pages in portrait mode fully zoomed out but it's hard to read that way. I read in landscape and just pan the document a bit. I'm finding more authors are publishing to PDF using one column. In those cases it just work. Pinch-zooming works but the text rarely (if ever) re-flows the way web pages do in Chrome.

I don't like the Adobe file browser on Android, though. It adds every PDF on the SD card to the master list. It's a giant scrollable list with each folder path as a section separator. I would like the option to toggle between hierarchical folder view and list.

I tried using Calibre to convert some PDFs to ePub. Two-column PDFs have been a disaster. I rarely get anything that's usable. YMMV. I decided to stick with PDFs (or .ps files I convert to PDF).

Using Chrome to read web pages is mostly workable. Strangely, clicking an HTML file in the file manager doesn't launch the regular Chrome browser. Rather you get the "HTML Viewer". It's mostly Chrome but has no open dialog or access to bookmarks (AFAICT).

As an Android device it's quite functional. Most market applications install without a problem. The one I have problems with are those for which the Download button doesn't appear. I haven't chased the issue down yet. Not sure whether it's a Cyanogen issue.

Google Books works great but you have to have internet access to read the books. Just goes to prove Android is really designed to be an always-connected OS. FBReader, on the other hand, just works.

As you can tell, it's no iPad in terms of "It Just Works". In sum, as a PDF reader I'm mostly happy with it. All the other features are bonuses. The issues are mostly irrelevant.

Lastly, if you check E-Bay or B&N's website they sell refurbed Nook Color's for $199. For an extra $50 you can get the extended warranty (if you're into those). For the same $249 for a new one with 1-year warranty you get a unit with a 2-year warranty.

Re:Nook Color handles 99% of my PDFs

[xtracto]

I own a Sony PRS-900 and use it *only* to read PDFs (mainly Comp. Science papers). So far what have worked for me is using Briss to automagically crop all the headers, footers and margins from all the pages.

For multicolumn papers the PRS-900 has a great multi-column reading mode (dividing the page in 4 quadrants, zooming in the first one and as you select "next page" going into the adequate next quadrant).

I installed Calibre some time ago but deleted it as it was a huge beast (it really made my computer crawl). I tried converting one or two PDFs to Ebooks but as you said the headers/footers messed everything. Maybe combining Briss with Calibre would work.

I have a small batch file in my desktop in which I drop every PDF before reading it. It has soPDF and Briss. I have had no problems reading any PDF so far.

easy

[djfake]

Just use a printer and let them pile up on your desk. When you finally get to finishing that paper, they'll be there, somewhere!

Non-touch screen eReaders are annoying

[Angrywhiteshoes]

I used to have the Kindle DX. I bought it so I didn't need to carry a bunch of paper or books around with me. But I soon found, that it was VERY annoying for using as reference or reading papers on. Jumping from page to page with the clicky buttons was very slow and you couldn't do any side-by-side comparison. Not to mention, if the PDF or whatever is an Image PDF, it takes a decade to load. I just went back to paper and books, can take notes in the margins, highlight easily, do side-by-side comparison and easy reference by keeping bookmarks and flipping between pages faster. Maybe its just the method Amazon uses to render the screen, but I didn't like it for those purposes. Others might have a different opinion than me or a better solution (which I'd be glad to hear since I hate carrying all my books, etc around).

Barnes & Noble Nook Touch

[Anonymous Coward]

The Barnes & Nobel Nook Touch is a touchscreen e-ink reader running Android 2.1 Eclair. It has been rooted with Google Apps installed: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1132693 . You can download ezPDF or Acrobat reader through Google market. I have a Nook Color, the color LCD version of this running Android 2.2 Froyo. It renders scientific papers quite well. I don't have direct experience with the Nook Touch, but I imagine the experience would be similar.

None Currently are Perfect

[BruiserBlanton]

I don't know what your discipline is, but I think it'll depend on what journals you typically read.

I'm a chemist, so a lot of what I read is from the American Chemical Society. Most of the articles are formatted for a big (bigger than letter size) with two column format. It's a big of a squeeze down to letter paper, but you can still read it.

I've got a Kindle DX and I find the ACS journals are just too small when fitted to the Kindle DX's viewable area. It's suppose to be able to show a letter-sized document in full but that's only if it has "standard" margins. Most journal articles don't have those standard margins. I personally am hoping for someone to market a 13.1 in diagonal e-reader which should be able to show a letter-size pdf in the full. Delta's eMagzine fits the bill but no commercial companies have brought it to the market.

If the article is one-column or manuscript-style, it should be easy to read on most e-readers but I would stay on the large size because of things like diagrams and small indices in equations.

I don't know of any readers that do postscript.

Biig screen

[Simulant]

For PDFs you need a big screen. None of the small screen e-paper readers will do, and judging by my phone, nothing less than a 10" tablet will do either.

Re:if the

[mark-t]

If all you need to have at hand is a single 700 page book, then portable electronic readers probably won't have anything to offer you.

If, however, you need to have at hand the equivalent of 10,000 pages worth of information (or more), then that's where an e-reader can probably be of help. Paper is heavy... ebooks are weightless... and the reader itself is generally only a few ounces.

Re:Nothing beats an iPad for heavy PDFs

[Tragek]

Ditto on the iPad.

I paid for Papers (Both on the Mac and iPad), and while it's passable, I really find their workflow disagrees with me. It just seems really hard to get CS to work in it properly (developed by Biological Sciences people, and it feels like the workflow for databases like the ACM DL and IEEE are a bit.. rushed)

  Final word: Use the trial for Papers on the Mac for sure. Papers on the iPad is perhaps easier to justify, though, I don't know if it'll run stand alone (can you import/export without the mac app?)

Take a look at the current crop of Android Tablets

[rafial]

I have the Galaxy Tab myself, and really like it, but I've also played with an Eee Transformer and was very impressed. I previously had the Xoom, and it was okay, but it's screen wasn't as good as the former two. The 10.1" Android Tablets have higher resolution screens than the current crop of iPads (1200x800 vs 1024x768), meaning a slightly higher DPI, meaning slightly easier on the eyes for reading.

Honeycomb gives you lots of flexibility as to how you get PDFs on to the device (e.g. via Dropbox, local file transfer, etc) combined with the freedom to then view those PDFs with the app of your choice. Android has a version of Adobe Reader, which while feature light, is pretty much guaranteed to correctly render any PDF you throw at it. For my own purposes though, I typically use RepliGo, which handles most things, is notably faster, and lets you view and add notes in PDFs.

What is it with the word "niche"??

[Demerara]

FTA: It seems right now that this particular niché is not being served: or is it?

Why do so many people have a problem with this word? I can put up with the US pronunciation (i.e. "nitch") though I grew up in Ireland and England pronouncing it what I presume to be a slightly French way - i.e. "neeesh"

But how in heavens did we arrive at "niché "??

Re:What is it with the word "niche"??

[jabberwock]

I thought it was spelled nietzsche. But that was from only one of my perspectives.

Re:illiad

[PopeRatzo]

I think you'd find an ereader useful as long as you're trying to read straight through some document

I have found the Kobo surprisingly good. And since Borders is gone, you can find Kobos for around $50. I would definitely take a look at one before you decide.

My wife's a mathematician and reads a lot of journal articles on her Kobo. Don't use the Kobo software, though. Just regular old Calibre.

I've got a different problem. I want to be able to read sheet music on my eReader. I finally got a nice 10" Android tablet, with a MusicXML (mXML) reader. I can load my Sibelius or Finale lead sheets, too.

Of course, orchestral scores are not so hot. For that, the best eReader is a nice big 1080p monitor. I use a USB foot pedal to turn pages. I wish I could come up with a foot pedal for my tablet, though. I'm learning the chromatic harmonica, and I often use the Android to read lead sheets or fake book pages, but I have to take a hand off the harp to turn a page.

Kindle with Duokan firmware

[zmughal]

I am currently using a Kindle 3 with the Duokan firmware and find the PDF readability much better in terms of the interface. It can also handle ePub, HTML, and DjVU. Possibly more formats, but I haven't tried those.

It has a rudimentary column splitting feature that lets you read the common two-column document format easily without having to continually zoom and pan.

I particularly like that it actually uses the filesystem to browse for documents, so I can organize the files my own way.

It also can play back OGG and FLAC in addition to the MP3s you get with the regular firmware.

I have tried a lot of them

[linuxguy]

I am in the same boat as you. I wanted an ideal portable device for reading PDF documents. Here is what I have tried so far:

1. Barnes and Noble Nook B&W e-ink device. PDFs simply do not look right on this device.
2. Barnes and Noble Nook Color. Slow processor and small screen. Some squinting and patience is required to read PDFs on this device.
3. ipad (1 & 2). Really good PDF rendering and pages turn fast. Downsides are: a) No easy way to transfer documents. Some may consider iTunes easy to work. I do not. b) Lower resolutio and physical size of the display when compared to Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and other similar Android devices.
4. Samsung Galaxy Tab 7". Very portable and reasonably fast processor. Downsides are: a) Battery drains faster than other modern tablets. b) Small and low resolution screen when compared to its big brother.
5. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. This is my current PDF reading device. I use it quite frequently. Display is excellent. Battery performance is outstanding. There are many ways to transfer documents. I just mount a share over the network and drag and drop content. Messing with cables and another computer etc. for doing this is stupid and Steve Jobs should know it. The only downside is that the PDF reader options on Android are not as good. The built-in reader on ipad is really really good. On Android, you have Adobe reader, that is missing some really critical functionality. For example you cannot bookmark a page. I currently use Aldiko. It is OK. It is a bit slow. And appears to render PDFs not as sharp. Also it acts utterly dumb if you switch to landscape mode. There is no way to tell it to fill the width of the screen. So I mostly read my docs in portrait mode and for that it is quite good. I really like the ability to change brightness level without using menus and moving my finger up and down.

Re:I have tried a lot of them

[tkdtaylor]

I just found the answer to my own question: http://www.everythingabouttablets.net/2011/05/08/polaris-office-android-market/
I'd definitely recommend grabbing the Transformer if your primary purpose is reading pdf's. I can't really comment on anything else because that's what I use it for and I'm very happy with it. I still need to pick up the dock/keyboard for mine and once I have it maybe I'll use it for chatting, email etc. but I don't really like typing on a touchscreen so I generally avoid anything that involves a lot of typing.

Don't do it.

[Badge 17]

E-ink products will not serve your needs. I'm a grad student in physics, and I tried doing exactly this. I love my Kindle for reading books, but the delay and screen size issues (even on the DX) made reading technical papers, where I often am moving back and forward quickly, frustrating. This leaves aside the difficulties of organization - ereaders are not really designed to have 200+ papers. I suggest getting a tablet instead - the ability to download new papers directly from the tablet is worth the additional money.

did you actually try an iPad?

[reversible physicist]

3. ipad (1 & 2). Really good PDF rendering and pages turn fast. Downsides are: a) No easy way to transfer documents. Some may consider iTunes easy to work. I do not. b) Lower resolutio and physical size of the display when compared to Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and other similar Android devices.

You don't need to use iTunes to transfer PDFs. There are several hundred PDF readers written specifically for the iPad. I've only tried a few of them but my favorites are Papers, GoodReader and AirSharing, none of which require you to use iTunes for transferring files. Direct access to servers, including mail servers and dropbox, is common. Did you actually try an iPad?

Screen too small

[Roger W Moore]

Current e-ink screens, while very nice outdoors, are far too small for a scientific paper. Until there is an A4-sized e-ink device you will not be able to use it to read scientific papers. I've found that using a tablet is the best way to go so far. While the screen is lower resolution and not very good outside the advantage is that it updates very quickly so it is easy to enlarge plots, enlarge the text and scroll around the now too-big-for-the-screen page etc. which you cannot do with e-ink.

If they ever release an affordable A4/letter e-ink device which displays PDFs then I'd go for that but until then tablets seem to be the best for scientific papers.

Try ezPDF Reader

[Fencepost]

I tried several readers that I had free access to (Adobe, ThinkFree Office included on the phone, Aldiko) and was not pleased with any of them. Little things like not recognizing that a table of contents actually had links to specific locations were deal-breakers.

I picked up ezPDF Reader from Amazon's AppStore as a free app (normally $2 in Market), but it pretty much just kicks ass. It recognizes links, allows you to display in either text-only or full page rendering, navigates well, and just generally wins. I've been using it with Digging Into WordPress which has quite a bit of very funky layout, and it's been working well. Highly recommended.