While I agree that nothing replaces paper- I spend two hours a day on public transport and spend the time reading books I've downloaded and put on my PDA. I have a super cheap PDA that I bought on liquidation - a Sony SL10 (monochrome screen, 8 Mg memory with a Sony memory stick for expansion. OS is Palm 4.0 - the avantage of the Sony for e-books is the jog wheel on the side - the disavantage of this model is battery life (2AAA) which is 10 hrs without the backlight but perhaps 1 hour with the backlight.
I still won't go back to paper books for my bus rides.
Slashdot Mirror
I was a teacher of English as a second language for a major language school for some years. The worst students we had were engineers (engineers live in a world of formulas and have trouble understanding that language is illogical). Also, for an adult who only speaks one language, learning a new language with any degree of fluency is the most difficult thing you will ever do. That said, speaking more than one language is always an asset. It's too bad that the useful languages for an engineer are so foreign to English (Manderin, Japanese, Hindi. etcé)
While I agree that nothing replaces paper- I spend two hours a day on public transport and spend the time reading books I've downloaded and put on my PDA. I have a super cheap PDA that I bought on liquidation - a Sony SL10 (monochrome screen, 8 Mg memory with a Sony memory stick for expansion. OS is Palm 4.0 - the avantage of the Sony for e-books is the jog wheel on the side - the disavantage of this model is battery life (2AAA) which is 10 hrs without the backlight but perhaps 1 hour with the backlight. I still won't go back to paper books for my bus rides.