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Ask Slashdot: E-ink Reader For Academic Papers?
Albanach writes "Recently, I purchased an e-ink Kindle. I like real paper books, but I'm reading lots of academic papers. The Kindle is a nice way to carry and read them, and I went through several documents, highlighting important passages. Now I learn that there is no supported way to actually get a highlighted personal document back off of the Kindle with the highlights intact. I don't need lectures about DRM, proprietary software or anything else along those lines — there are other things the Kindle can and will be used for. What I would like to know is whether there's another e-ink reader that does let you add your own documents, then highlight them and export the altered document. Or does someone know of a way to achieve this using the Kindle itself?"
"I don't need lectures about DRM, proprietary software or anything else along those lines"
Are you sure you posted this to the right geek news site?
They exist. Don't pick one that is too weak to display large PDFs or too small to comfortably navigate A4. I'd probably pick this 9.7" Icarus Excel if I had to choose one right now: http://www.amazon.com/ICARUS-R...
I tried making use of a kindle for reading papers but in the end found the experience too clunky and cumbersome - especially with dual column PDFs. Instead I've ended up using a 7 inch tablet (nexus 7 in my case) and a good PDF reader (settled on ezPDF reader). My kindle wasn't touch enabled so that may have been part of it, but even then I found it easier and more reliable to load and annotate the PDF in a good reader on a tablet.
jaymz
If I remember right there's a function within calibre which detects the meta data from kindle/pdf formats and allows it to read the highlighted meta data
Last I checked, the Kindle is capable of reading and displaying quite a few non-DRM formats. You're stuck with DRM if you purchase books from Amazon, yes, but nothing about the device itself locks you into DRM.
i think if I had the chance would get a kindle dx for the larger format as an e-reader. I have the 7" kindle for but techy books and whitepapers it is annoying to read from
Swindle! so clever and witty! right up there with M$ and Microsucks.
I had a Kobo-Reader and my girlfriend has a Kindle. We both evaluated using these readers to read scientific papers. These papers come in PDF and are sometimes in a two-column style. Reading PDFs is a mess on both readers. This also applies to the Tolino, which my niece bought recently. The problem with papers is, that they are more or less A4-documents and not A5. Therefore, they are hard to read on the small screen anyway. What works somewhat better are scientific books, which are available as e-book. I have some books on compiler construction and I can easily read them on my fairphone (android), on my netbook (linux, kindle+wine) and on my computer at work. Notes are transferred between all three machines. As long as you are inside Kindle.
Papers I read in print or on my girlfriends galaxy note 10.1, which in conjunction with Acrobat-Reader allows to mark things and store the markings in the document. I also use it to add my comments to students, so they can get my comment by mail and do not have to come to my office ;-)
To be fair, I'd say it's at least a point or two more clever than either of those.
Don't ever let something like DRM get in the way of you getting your work done.
Screw it. Use Calibre and root your Kindle. Strip out the DRM and get a proper reader app.
There is no moral requirement for you to participate in corporate insanity.
In the words of a great tech guru: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."
And while we're at it, "All you have to do is be yourself, do your will, and rejoice."
You are welcome on my lawn.
I have been using one for several years already and it is great. My daily companion to academic papers. Btw, the OS is linux 2.6, so...
The downside: battery life sucks. If it is on, it lasts one day at most.
I have a little rant because I hate these little fucking problems like the OP is talking about. That is bullshit. What the fuck is the point of the highlighting feature if you cannot take it off and use it somewhere else? Seriously.. it would be like 4 hours of a Kindle programmers' time to implement that feature. I hate that shit.
Also, fuck the cloud. Every company wants to create their little own proprietary cloud that envisions you being locked into their half-assed limited selection of crap. Microsoft Skydrive.. now I'm stuck with only using Microsoft. Everyone else is the same. Where the fuck is my cloud that works on any device and lets me store any document there. Maybe dropbox is the best so far.. but something tells me I cannot store my Kindle books, Nook books, Itunes, or any other media on that cloud. It's my fucking media.. Let me store it wherever the fuck I want on whatever the fuck device I want to store it on. Maybe the new Kindle sucks and some other company makes a better implementation. Let me move my shit there.
Also, why the fuck can't all my devices just report back to a shared drive on my computer. Why can't I just have a 'pdb' (personal database) file that is constantly updating with any device I own. Let it encrypt the parts that need encryption. Let the interface pop up with a list of checkmarks and I (the GODDAMN USER THAT IS BUYING THIS CRAP) decide what I want my device to be able to access, copy, and modify out of my personal database. Seriously.. the idea that it's not just built-in to store files to a share drive on every new tablet and cell phone is as frustrating as watching someone try to be productive on Windows 8.
This ones for Android.. let me tell the fucking device when to update! I don't want it updating my apps when I picked it up to quickly read a pdf. I don't need it trying to use my internet connection when I'm at some fucking remote site 3rd world country with barely any cell phone coverage deciding it needs to update some bloated app I never use.
This one is for Windows.. updating when I want to turn off my laptop and telling me not to turn it off is retarded. Whoever decided that is the time to update should be slammed on the pavement like how Hulk smashed Loki.
I have a lot more to rant about.. but I am going to take a vacation away from technology for the next few hours.
I cannot believe people think we're innovating at this time.. We're taking 3 steps forward and 12 steps back. Fuck you, Kindle, for reminding me of this non-interchangeable mess that we call the technology world. Shit should work together. If we had a PDB that was universal (and with compatibility layers for all the proprietary shit - APPLE), then maybe the consumer wouldn't think it was such a pain in the ass to move to a new device.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Have a look at the PocketBook e-ink readers. Sadly, they have left USA market, unable to compete with Amazon.
Here in my European country, in an online store specialized on e-book readers PocketBook is by far the most popular brand. Keep in mind that most people buying kindles are buying them directly from Amazon.
I have PocketBook Touch Lux 623. The screen and front-light are the same as on Kindle Paperwhite. It supports 18 e-book formats and lots of configuration options, all without hacking. It has headphones output with support of TTS in many languages. You can use micro SD card. There are third-party programs available, such as scientific calculator, Linux terminal (for hacking - the reader itself has busybox installed), ftp server (so you can look at *and* modify files from internal memory), Coolreader, chess, several games, Vim text editor (full-fledged recent version).
You can make your own notes and highlights and PocketBook will prepare html file for each document with your notes that you can download to your PC. No special software necessary.
You can import PocketBook from Europe.
The obvious part: Root it and install a more capable e-reader app. My recommendation: I prefer Moon+ Reader Pro, which will not only give you a highlighted and annotated file you can use elsewhere, it can also, with one click, generate a document with annotations and highlights only that you can e-mail to yourself. I should not that this is something even Acrobat Pro can't do, and also note that Moon+ is more feature complete and easy to use than is Adobe's offering for Android. NB: I don't have any stake in Moon+, nor give a crap what money they make. I'm sharing because I spent too much time wading thru all the e-reader apps to find this one.
The only one I know of is Sony's Mobius, which was conceived specifically with academia in mind.
When I lived in China I remember seeing a lot of "national" alternatives to kindle. They did cost more but they had many advantages: colors (at the time the only e-ink readers with colors were Chinese, don't know now), different sizes, the larger ones being much better for reading PDFs than kindle, and better compatibility options. I deeply regret going cheap (I bought a kindle because of the price).
Here is a link for one of them (I remembered the brand and made a search). They say you can embed notes to pdf and etc: Hanvon WISereader
There are other ones, but this is a starting point. Sorry for not remembering other brands.
Good luck.
https://www.google.com.br/sear...
none
Instead of mindlessly repeating Free Software adages that, while important in the right contexts, don't even apply to the present situation, you ought to learn how the Kindle works. The Kindle is jailbreakable and one can run any custom software they like on it. While there was a scandal some years back about Amazon deleting content from Kindles, you have nothing to fear if you simply keep your device in airplane mode all the time (if you don't plan on buying from Amazon, there's no real reason to use the device's wifi or 3G capabilities anyway).
There is a file called documents/My Clippings.txt if I'm not mistaken. Some time ago, I wrote a simple program (kindleclip — https://github.com/gwolf/kindl... ) that presents you highlights, bookmarks and comments, allows you to search, either by book or by date. It's a GTK2 project built with Glade however, and I have not yet ported it to use current alternatives, but at least I believe the source to be quite readable/followable. Hope you find it useful.
you have nothing to fear if you simply keep your device in airplane mode all the time
Like saying you're less likely to get robbed if you never go outside the house.
whoosh
I think what you're really looking for is a research paper management application, such as Mendeley, Zotero or Papers. I personally use Papers, but that's a very mac-specific solution. There is apparently a Mendeley-specific application called KinSync that should help with using it on the Kindle. In general, if you're reading a bunch of academic papers and you don't have a manager like this, I recommend getting one.
Log in Mr. Stahlman. Log in.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Been asking myself the same question the last couple of months, as the quantity of books required these days has become too much to carry. I first considered the Kindle DX, but I'm not familiar with the OS "ecosystem" of Amazon and the restrictions within (transfer of files/DRM). After some more searching I ended up deciding on the Boyue G10 (random chinese device), as linked here: http://www.aliexpress.com/item... Very satisfied with it.
I help maintain Xournal (a PDF annotation software) and like you, do a lot of reading and reviewing of papers.
My suggestion is to use Xournal on a tablet. The best, in my opinion, is the Thinkpad Tablet 2 with a wacom digitizer. It is very nice and a great deal these days. It can't do much, but it runs xournal beautifully. But for me, it is purely a PDF annotator:
There are several advantages to it:
1. It has a wacom digitizer. I can't stress it enough. There is no comparison to any other digitizer in the market. You get true pressure sensitivity and subpixel sampling.
2. Xournal is very good at capturing and rendering handwritten annotations. It has a very high sampling, making the annotations very accurate.
3. you can use dropbox to load the files in the Thinkpad. As you save them, they get saved to dropbox and loaded in other computers.
4. You can open several documents at once
The Thinkpad Tablet 2 is underpowered as a real windows tablet, but it is really good for just this purpose. If you want to discuss more about it, you can find me at github as dmgerman.
--dmg
You want a device w/ an active stylus and decent software support for that --- unfortunately, these haven't faired well in the market.
The Icarus Excel is one which seems to still be available --- 9.7" E-Ink Pearl screen, for a paperlike reading experience
Supports handwritten notes and annotations with Wacom technology: http://blog.the-ebook-reader.c...
I just always use a Tablet PC as my main machine --- I do have a Sony PRS-600, but it's not easy to get the annotations off of it.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Try this - http://www.bookeen.com/en/cybook/odyssey - French made and so much better than Kindle.
I cannot read a maths book or paper without writing on it.
Microsoft OneNote is cloud-based with syncing, has drawing tools, OCR for image content, handwritten comments, and even a Maths editor, and can organize your stuff. There might even be a symbolic calculator buried somewhere in it. I use it on a Surface Pro; to make the handwritten annotation part work well you really need the Wacom Stylus.
There are a bunch of PDF readers on the PC and Mac which can annotate. I think they all export the annotated PDF, and a couple of smart folders or Google Drive might be enough to maintain a synced system.
Unfortunately, this whole area is one where proprietary is ahead of open source - OneNote and InkSeine are masterworks.
Edmund
This is not a signature.
Richard Stallman has been calling it the Swindle for years.
The problem is not the Kindle. Publishers (particularly scholarly publishers ) have not adopted epub format. PDFs do not reflow to screen size therefore they will NEVER be useful in devices of variable screen sizing. Sorry. There is no reason you should not be able to get you publications in a format that would be more convenient to read on any eReader. Check put http://elife.elifesciences.org... and down load the epub version of the article. I wish plosone.org had the good sense to provide an epub versions but they are too far behind the times.
I suffered reading large pdfs for years with my first gen Asus Transformer TF101 and finally sought an alternative and found super pleasantly that Perfect Viewer's pdf plugin works flawlessly.
There is a file called documents/My Clippings.txt if I'm not mistaken. Some time ago, I wrote a simple program (kindleclip — https://github.com/gwolf/kindl... ) that presents you highlights, bookmarks and comments, allows you to search, either by book or by date. It's a GTK2 project built with Glade however, and I have not yet ported it to use current alternatives, but at least I believe the source to be quite readable/followable. Hope you find it useful.
^ This. While that may be a little cumbersome to sync it all, I think that's the best you'll probably get with the Kindle.
If you limit yourself to e-ink readers, I predict that you will suffer from endless problems with finding software that does what you want. You may have to bite the bullet and get a general-purpose tablet PC.
Go for a lightweight tablet with a Wacom stylus (digitizer), as this kind of stylus will give you a far better user experience for highlighting and handwriting than an ordinary capacitive stylus would. The Surface Pro has a Wacom stylus, but is too heavy for comfortable one-handed use. I would recommend looking into the Samsung Galaxy Note Tablet (running Android), or the Samsung Ativ or Thinkpad tablets (running Windows 8).
In the Windows world, Qiqqa is a cloud-synced reference and citation manager that will sync annotations, although you can't export the altered document like you wanted. It's likely that both Windows 8 and Android have numerous PDF annotation applications which will suit your needs. You may have better luck in the Windows than the Android world, because you will want your application to have native Wacom digitizer support (distinguishing between finger and pen presses, allowing you to scroll with your finger and highlight with your pen). There may be a PDF annotation application in Android that does this, but Wacom digitizers have historically been far more common in Windows than Android, and the good Wacom support in Windows applications reflects this.
Aha -- you beat me to the punch. Yes, this is one thing (the only thing?) that Windows 8 tablets really excel at, as Windows has long-standing (since XP) and mature support for pen digitizers.
I thought that as long as you put your document on your Kindle using Amazon's servers - basically meaning you send the document to your Kindle's email address rather than transferring it over USB - things like highlights and bookmarks would be synced to Amazon's servers (which would make them transferable)?
#DeleteChrome
Google it.
There are two things a Kindle does with its WiFi connection: Downloading content from Amazon and running a barely functional web browser. If you aren't going to use the Amazon store there's basically nothing worth using the WiFi for.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
You're stuck with DRM if you purchase books from Amazon, yes, but nothing about the device itself locks you into DRM.
Uh, no. Publishers choose whether they put DRM on Amazon ebooks, there's no requirement to use it. I've never intentionally bought a DRM-ed ebook on Amazon.
In the business world, I and many others use an iPad and GoodReader for annotating board papers. To be honest, it's the only thing that I use an iPad for, as I prefer a proper PC, a smartphone or a smaller tablet for anything else.
GoodReader allows you to annotate pdfs with a wide range of tools - I usually scribble free form text with my finger - and you can read the annotations with any pdf reader. The large format of the full size iPad simplifies finger writing, and the large retina screen means that I can read dense data tables without needing to zoom in.
Despite Apple's dumbed-down iOS, GoodReader allows you to organise documents in a hierarchical folder structure, and you can synchronise your documents with a wide range of server types and cloud storage systems.
It's not the cheapest solution around, but it's by far the best that I've ever encountered amongst my business associates.
It occasionally downloads firmware updates also. And of course you can transfer your own files via the Amazon link.
What a whiner. You really fail at "personal responsibility", and understanding how programming and software work. Your comment history is hilarious too. You should stick to hyping bitcoin.
I purchased a Nook for this. It reads EPUB, PDF, and of course B&N DRMed stuff. I can transfer my documents directly to the Nook using Calibre and haven't had much to complain about. When I purchased my Nook, the Kindle didn't allow directly installing documents and instead required my uploading to Amazon for it to show up on the device. I'm sure that has changed, but I'm still happy with the Nook.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
This is a 9.7 (1200x825 px) inch e-ink reader. Supports most PDFs perfectly. It allows you to hightlight text and to scribble on them. You can then save the annotated version to a standard PDF that can be opened with the annotations and all on a PC with Adobe Reader or similar.
The hardware is somewhat old at this point and there's supossedly going to be a refresh in the near future (m96) with Android. They're supossedly even sponsoring a contest to develop e-ink optimized Android applications.
Warning: This is a exclusively reading device: It does have wifi and a browser but it's rubbish and many websites do not work well. They're also a bit fragile (specially the screen) so they must be treated carefully.
More info: http://www.mobileread.com/foru....
Official website (the chinese version has much more info than the English one): http://www.onyx-international....
Only one that works best for it, sadly it's discontinued as it seems that most people are weak waifs that cant carry a 9 inch E reader because they are soooooo heavy.
I wish they would release a Kindle XL-DX that has a display the size of a US Legal piece of paper. but I doubt we will see any useable e-ink readers released as the bulk of sales are for paperback recreational reading and not for professional or education use.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Also synchronizing reading progress between different devices, and as Ozoner pointed out, getting firmware updates and transferring your own files. I buy my books from Baen (DRM free, not that I really care), and just tell Baen to e-mail them to my kindle directly. It's simpler than plugging it into a computer and copying them over.
While it wont change the original document, If you go to kindle.amazon.com you can view your highlights and notes. Then just copy and paste to create a new document with only the important parts. I read a lot of books about programming and after a little clean up it works great for code examples.
Here is a video I found demonstrating what you need:
"Onyx Boox M92. Scribbling in PDFs. Merging of scribbled annotations in a new PDF.
New annotated PDF can be easily opened on every other PDF Reading program on your PC"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfr1lHAtl4A
The guy who posted the video is well known on the forums dedicated to mobile readers. He knows a lot about them and offering help to other people.
He have a site where he is selling this model:
http://ereader-store.de/en/onyx-boox/38-onyx-boox-m92-black.html
The most important thing is thatthe support is very good. There are a lot of software updgrades. The latest for this model is from December 4, 2013.
There is a very useful feature presented
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltl3nv0C09I
"Onyx Boox M92. Manual setting of margins of scanned PDF Documents. As you can see here it is very easy to setup margins of your PDF documents on that device. You can adjust either universal margins for entire document or, If you want, you can set margins for odd and even pages separately like on presented video. It is especially very usefull if you read some older scanned books or documents."
OK, I appologise for the fact that the post contains a lot of copy and paste from the youtube .
I do not have too much time to write this so please forgeive me for the way this post looks.
I just hope that the information is useful.
I also read a lot of research papers. I sometimes discuss them in academic groups and need to highlight parts for quick and easy reference.
I've tried a variety of eReaders (glowy ones with touch screens) and tried converting PDFs to eBooks and HTML, I've used a smartphone, I've taken my laptop with me. I've looked at what others are doing to see if they've got any good ideas.
I hate printers and agree with The Oatmeal that they were sent from hell: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/p...
What do I do now? I get my local print-shop to print them out for me. They can even turn them into neat little books with enough space around to write notes. It's not very tree friendly so I do it judiciously but good ol' fashioned paper is unbeatable in my opinion.
You're only borrowing the work, it's not appropriate for you to highlight it any more than it would be a library book.
I've noticed a huge increase in battery life by keeping my paperwhite in airplane mode. Use Calibre, to copy over books via USB and you don't even need to worry about what directory to put them in.
The Kindle is holding your copy of the book. You are annotating your copy of the book and highlighting it.
Were it a hardcopy book, your highlights would not automagically transfer to another copy of the book.
Why, then, do you expect to be able to export/read your annotations and highlights from a Kindle?
In order to do what you want, you'd effectivly have to be able to edit the book to embed your notes. If that's really what you want to do, get a document file and edit away, but don't expect an eReader to let you edit the books.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
http://www.nathancolquhoun.com/2012/11/26/export-notes-and-highlights-from-pdf-on-your-kindle
Avoid like the plague. The screen is dim, the battery life sucks, the maker went bust, there's no way to get annotations off the device in an easy way, renaming a PDF obliterates your annotations...
Do the firmware updates actually do anything, though? In three years of owning a third-generation wifi Kindle, I have never seen anything change—despite a handful of significant-seeming firmware updates. If they're security-related... then airplane mode still solves that.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
The OP specifically said they didn't want to engage in a philosophical discussion about DRM. You chose to go there anyway. Are you mental? OCD? A bit me-obsessed?
You think this is important. The OP does not. If you wish to be relevant and interesting you must pay attention and interact with the OP as though they are a thinking human being.
If not, you deserve what you got.
A lot of eink readers have crap PDF interpreters - sometimes that's the software and sometimes the PDF has been formatted in such a way that you need more serious hardware than the eink reader has to deal with it in a timely manner. When a PDF is 50M for less than 10 pages it falls into that broken category where a decent computer is needed to even look at the things.
The answer is to work out what the software and hardware limitations are and reformat the PDF to display properly on the device you have and just throw out the crap put in by software that thinks the end user should just scale down from 1200dpi or similar mistakes. Outputting each page as a jpeg of exactly the same resolution as the devices screen and then concatinating it into a PDF can turn something can't even open into a something with no more lag than an epub when turning pages. That's the trick people use to put enormous PDF files of comics scanned at high resolution 24 bit colour on their greyscale eink devices.
There's a few things that can do that. Ghostscript plus Imagemagik is a free crossplatform one. I suspect Calibre can do that sort of stuff as well.
So if the device can only read very simple PDF files modify the complex file to be simple. In most cases it will still look exactly the same as the original and your device often can't use the OCR content or other assorted bells and whistles anyway.
Firmware updates can also be installed via USB.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Somewhat off topic, but I'm put off by the resolution of eInk devices. The readers I have seen have relatively low pixel density compared to recent phones, tablets and laptops. Any experience with reading equations and formulae on these? How about diagrams, figures?
The Kindle has a mechanical page turning button. Just build a scanner rig around your digital camera with a little robot thing to keep pushing the next page button, then the camera button, then next page, etc.
Hi,
I was looking for Kindle alternatives the other day and ran across across this vlog about best e-ink devices of 2013. of note for you may be the Icarus and sony large format e-ink readers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
the vlog authors at http://www.youtube.com/user/go... have their own store. You may want to look into the (rather expensive) sony and icarus pen enabled devices.
As far as kindle goes, if you root the kindle you can access Cool Reader and other tools that may do what you want.
I would also suggest looking into Calibre and its ecosystem of plugins.
I have had good luck using Notability for iOS:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/notability/id360593530?mt=8
Easy to import PDFs, easy to highlight, easy to annotate with handwriting or typing, and easy to export back to PDF. Fairly responsive on my old first generation iPad.
The only drawbacks I've found are:
1. Documents with handwriting or free form drawing get larger r than I would expect (~ 1 MB per page for a page of Calculus homework or doodles)
2. Doesn't support ssh or git for uploading/downloading documents
I've also looked at this myself - there are a few readers that are ~10" and read PDFs quite well (e.g. the Onyx BOOX M92 or the aforementioned Icaus eXceL), but as far as I can tell none support true PDF annotations (e.g. highlighting some text). They typically support sketch or typed annotations, which can be merged back with the original PDF, sometimes as an additional layer. But none seem to support native PDF annotations...
A recent Paperwhite firmware update added deep support for goodreads.com (putting it on par with the Amazon store), and a feature called "FreeTime" intended to let parents track reading progress and reward their kids for it.
I spend all day reading academic papers for my PhD. I go between three devices:
(1) Netbook running Linux with a PixelQi screen. Hard to go back to a standard screen after using one of these. Use Zim desktop wiki to take notes if you can live with notes in a separate file. The nice thing about Zim is that it saves everything in plain text format so you can easily share it across platforms. Using a keyboard-only windows manager like ratpoison makes it feel more like an e-reader and less like a desktop computer.
(2) Sony PRS-950. Decent pdf rendering capabilities, good annotation features for files with text layer. Mounts as external storage and can take an SD card. Solid build and stable software. Nice format for academic papers so long as you crop the pages first with a program like k2opt first (onboard zooming is possible but a little cumbersome). Annotations are not saved to the pdf, but they are written in an XML file which is easy to run through sed and do with as you will. Very basic internet connectivity; I think of the cumbersome brower as aplus (it's less tempting to use, so you don't get distracted from reading what you meant to).
(3) A rooted Nook Simple Touch Glowlight. This is my pick of the bunch. It is far less buggy and cumbersome than you'd expect from a hacked device, it functions almost flawlessly as an Android tablet once you remove the B&N crap, and makes me surprised that no one else has tried to release a device intended to be used like this. I run EZPdf reader on it to take advantage of its annotation features, or the mupdf based eBookDroid for documents that don't require annotation (the quality and speed of the rendering is unmatched by anything I've seen). Using Opera I can download academic papers directly from the web. The device is responsive enough that the small screen does not seem like a limitation; panning and zooming is easy and natural. A stylus also works with the touch screen quite wel. It can deven function in host mode with an external keyboard (although there are some issues with battery drain) and, to top it off, runs debian in a chroot, so far with no problems at all. This allows you to do things like sync it using unison, and download papers via ftp off a server, without needing to mess around with android apps.
http://imcosys.com/ sells the imcoV6L, an e-ink reader which runs on android (2.3.1, sadly). So you can use whatever android-software there is.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
Firmware updates have brought improving PDF support. It is a complex format to handle, and I have run into bugs with certain PDF files that were then fixed in the next firmware update.
ROTFLMAO @ "Chumpy" -> http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...
(You sure "talk a good game" -> http://games.slashdot.org/comm... but you can't even produce a MERE SCRIPT!, windbag...)
You aren't even on the leve of a "script kiddie", & full of HOT AIR!
You certainly won't reply there in that 2nd link I posted either, as that would remove your downmods to my posts like this one you can't validly disprove or justify your downmod on -> http://games.slashdot.org/comm...
Oh, I suspect that IS the case here (simply logging out of a registered account & trolling by ac is a common troll trick around here OR using alternate registered 'luser' accounts sockpuppets to do the job will also, & Lumpy is LOADED with those & trolling - which doesn't matter: He PROVES he's all talk, no action (or skills, OR brains, lol))
(You're all TALK, & NO action "CHUMPY!)
* :)
(You know it, I know it, & so does anyone reading AND laughing their asses off @ you now... lol!)
APK
P.S.=> Answer the question in the subject-line Lumpy - since you had to "eat your wrods" in the 1st link above flavored with your FOOT IN YOUR MOUTH + the "bitter taste of SELF-defeat", lol...
... apk