BOOKS, TABLET or KINDLE?

[Amapola]

I love books but as others have said, they take up a lot of room. Like you, I have a large library of books on board. I'm slowly paring down and not buying more. I have a Kindle Paperwhite and a Kindle Fire. I also have the Kindle App on my Android phone and Dell laptop. For reading, the Paperwhite is my favorite. Kindle's are easy to use. I just download from my Amazon account. The Paperwhite has its own internet connection built in. I purchased it with the option of no ads.

[Rogmou]

Originally Posted by denverd0n

Because of all the tablets and e-readers that I've looked at (and I've looked at a LOT of them!) the only one -- THE ONLY ONE! -- that is just as easy to read in full, direct sunlight as a "real" book is the Kindle Paperwhite. None of the others really even come close.



And let's face it, in terms of "boat-bucks," e-readers and tablets are pretty cheap. Get a Kindle Paperwhite for when you want to read, and a tablet to do all that other stuff.

Absolutely!!. Kindle Paperwhite does´t reflect and the battery wastes for a very long time. This is "THE ONLY ONE!", far from any other ..

[CruisingKitty]

My Kindle has just expired and I am very happy that I have loaded Kindle apps onto my laptop and mobile phone. When you go electronic, you must have backup.

Also, you can't trade your Kindle for another at the leave-one take-one book exchanges at ports and marinas. I have read so many interesting books that I might never have selected for myself because of the exchanges, all for free. I guess it depends on how far from home you intend to sail. We often joke, "How can you tell a cruiser? They've bought one book and read 200."

I agree with the comment that Kindle is best for uncomplicated reading. Complex stories are better in print. I love having both options. I take a few books along for trading and that way the stock is always rotating rather than growing.

[leftbrainstuff]

Kindle for text, tablet for anything with images. We still have lots of books which available electronically. I'd love to get rid of them all. Weight, salt air and space they consume are all negative. I also dont like the smell and feel of most books.

I love books but travel every week so digital versions make sense to me. Dropbox provides syncing and cloud backup. Its also simple to have local copies.

We alao have all our ships manuals in electronic form. Making it muchbeasier to fund information when needed.

[Dooglas]

Originally Posted by ppvora

Although Adobe Systems is the creator of the pdf format, there are many free and open-source pdf readers, so pdf readers will likely be available for a long time after the demise of Amazon and Apple.

Adobe is also the creator of the ePub format which most e-readers can use (including Nook and Kobo). That is also the format for e-books used by most public libraries. If you have tried to read a book in .pdf format you will understand why ePub was developed. Books in ePub format will be around as long as you want them to be.

[Dooglas]

Originally Posted by Rogmou

Absolutely!!. Kindle Paperwhite does´t reflect and the battery wastes (lasts?) for a very long time. This is "THE ONLY ONE!", far from any other ..

Actually, the Kindle Paperwhite uses a proprietary screen developed by E-ink. The same screen used in the Kimble Paperwhite is also used in the Nook Glowlight Plus and the KOBO Glo HD.

[Macblaze]

Originally Posted by Dooglas

Adobe is also the creator of the ePub format which most e-readers can use (including Nook and Kobo). That is also the format for e-books used by most public libraries. If you have tried to read a book in .pdf format you will understand why ePub was developed. Books in ePub format will be around as long as you want them to be.

Just a quibble, but AFAIK Adobe didn't invent epubs like they did pdfs. Epubs are an open standard developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum. Its a moving target (they are pushing epub3's now) but hopefully they will always remain backwards compatible.

And ya, people should be careful not to use kindle synonymously with ebook. There are plenty of equivalent competitors to the Paperwhite.

[hellosailor]

"you have tried to read a book in .pdf format you will understand why ePub was developed."
A bit misinformed there.
First of all, the PDF format is an OPEN FORMAT. It stands for Portable Document Format and it is a specification, written by Adobe, saying what and how their Adobe PostScript computer language shall be used to produce electronic documents that can be read on almost any platform. Postscript is a description/rendering language, capable of "rendering" a reproduction of any printed page image regardless of the fonts, text styles, or images appearing on that page. And doing this seamlessly, without distortion, no matter what size the page is rendered at.
PostScript was pretty damned radical when it came out. Anyone could use the PS language, but if you wanted to essentially write a "print driver" so you could "print to": to PostScript file, you had to reverse engineer the way that Adobe had done this (with years of major poroblems) and then write your own driver. Or, you had to LICENSE OR BUY the Adobe driver, usually known as Adobe PostScript something-or-other and these days they're pushing that as Adobe PostScript DC, a cloud subscription service, no longer a purchase.

Anyone can label a file "PDF". That doesn't mean it will conform to the specifications. Anyone can produce a PDF file, which is a standardized PostScript language file. The differences between a PostScript file, and a PDF file, have to do with page element definitions and dependences, among other things. PDF files can also be "PDF fillable forms" where you can open the file on an Acrobat Reader or other program, and literally fill them in on screen--as opposed to just reading them in a PDF file, or printing then out and filling them in by hand.

There are lots of subtle differences in what folks call "Adobe" files or "PDF" files. It is designed to be a system (PostScript) that literally can do computations and programming live, it is a rich computer language, not just "ebooks".

The epub system was designed to be implemented on CHEAP LOW POWER devices, ebook readers, and as such it has very limited abilities. If PostScript (including PDF) was a Caterpillar bulldozer, ebook would be your beach toy shovel. Confusing the two sometimes may lead to surprises.

If you go back 25 years ago, you could take the fastest "personal" or small office computers on the market, and it could still take them hours to render just ONE page from a cmputer program into a PostScript page file, the equivalent of one page of a PDF or ebook. Except, the ebook file would probably have lost half the imaging.

I think ebooks are great, for their purpose. The form is entirely inappropriate for anything complicated or detailed. But PostScript, and PDF, can still bring new systems to their knees. Simple PDF files, great for interchange and even good for ebooks. But can I substitute any one of 50,000 fonts for the one in my ebook, in epub format?
No.
No I make the text any size I want, not just "bigger/smaller" in an epub reader? Dunno, but for sure not on my Kindle.
And then if you get into the hallmarks of real typesetting (wordspacing, letterspacing, kerning pairs, ligatures, n-spaces versus thin spaces versus m-spaces) you won't find that in epubs. There may be some provision for it, but again, not on your local Kindle.

PDF was made so it can be read, and done, easily. If you bought the Adobe software. And after 10-15 years, some of the other imitators have done a good job producing other tools. But just because you can read it easily...don't mistake the tip for the iceberg.

[Macblaze]

Originally Posted by hellosailor

"you have tried to read a book in .pdf format you will understand why ePub was developed."
A bit misinformed there.

...

Now I think all that was more misleading than the "you have tried to read a book in .pdf format you will understand why ePub was developed." statement

Pdfs are a real pain to read on any device besides a big monitor. The text isn't reflowable—so if Joe Book-designer decided to set it at 10 pt type on a 9 x 12 page format then viewing it on anything smaller is a royal pain in the butt. Back when we were all starting to think about digitizing our books we all considered, then discarded pdfs—they just weren't consumer friendly. In fact, most of the books I worked on still aren't available digitally because selling pdfs didn't make economic sense and, as you say, epubs just can't handle complex formatting.

I have a collection of pdf-guide books but almost always resort to the printed ones unless I have to. Pdfs just don't translate into a easy-reading experience. A physical book has a lot going for it that doesn't universally translate to electronic format. And if I had them as epubs then all the lovely graphics and tables and such would just turn to *****.

As for ebooks, well, ligatures, em-dashes, thin spaces etc. are all possible if the book designers are willing to get with it. But it (book design) is still an industry in transition and most print designers are not code jockeys and can't make the leap. Funnily I have spent the last two weeks trying to learn epub design and to include as much of the niceties of typography as possible into what is basically glorified html. The format is not there yet, but it's coming.

To bring this back to sailing...interestingly, the people who produce the Salish Sea Pilot Guides (https://salishseapilot.com/) just went through all their guides and reformatted them for landscape screens. They realized no one was really able to read them well in the traditional book portrait orientation so made them computer screen friendly instead.

I also think it's because more and more people are using things like OPENCPN instead of traditional chartplotters so they have a computer monitor right there.

[CatNewBee]

any publication that relies on images, schematics etc. is better off on pdf, any publication that is mainly text like fiction, literature etc is best in epub format for easy reading where formal structure is not important and text can free float.

[dhr]

This has been a fun thread. My answer is all of the above. I have a slightly old Chapman. It’s paper I have no intention of trying to read it on any kind of a small digital screen. I read novels most days on my Tablet. great for that especially when I can download them from the Library. So I have a few books on the boat. More in my den and lots digitally.

[Dooglas]

Originally Posted by Macblaze

Just a quibble, but AFAIK Adobe didn't invent epubs like they did pdfs. Epubs are an open standard developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum.

You are right, of course. Epub is a file standard. What Adobe actually created was Adobe Digital Editions which is the software I use to download, convert, file, and retrieve e-books in the Epub format.

[hellosailor]

"Pdfs are a real pain to read on any device besides a big monitor. The text isn't reflowable"
Nope. Stop right there.
I knew how to program in PostScript and how to modify PS files to correct errors that had been generated in them. I was an early adopter of PS and worked with a number of folks at Adobe, and was actually instrumental in getting some global corporations to change over from text files to PDF for their global disseminations. I knew it inside out.
If you took a PS file that was generated by WordPerfect, every LINE in the page was converted as a LINE, so it couldn't be reflowed at all. That was one reason many of us hated "WordBlurfect". But if you take a PS file, and you generate it WITHOUT those line breaks?
You can reflow it to your hearts content.
It all depends on the knowledge and competency of the person doing the conversion. I've set long PDF files, and they reflow without any problem.
On the other hand, even today, you can take a MS Word file, click Word's internal "Convert to PDF" button, and the file comes out as chop suey. Because the Word formatting can be so variable in terms of how columns and tables and text wraps are formatted, Word may export them into PDF using certain commands that do keep the appearance--but then when you try to reimport them, you get the dogs' dinner because it hasn't been able to find the original logic of the layout. Which is not all Word's fault, because PDF is intended as a DESTINATION not an interchange format. And despite that, there are any number of "PDF editors" which will allow you to edit the content of a PDF file, have it or allow it to reflow, and generate a new PDF file, with correct new line and page breaks.

Print designed do not and should not have ot be code jockeys. Using XyWrite or LaTex or other early 80's tools did require them to be. As did "simple" typography, with code driven typesetting machines. But even by the mid-80's, PageMaker, QuarkXpress, Ventura Publisher, all allowed professional grade typography JUST USING THAT PROGRAM and without any "coding" needed.

Assuming that you had someone with some knowledge of typography and some skills up front. We could look at a printed page and tell you immediately if it had been done by someone in PageMaker or Quark right out of the box--because every program had quirks that made for lousy typography, and every real pro always customized those (often very subtly but definitely differently) to make a better printed product.

Sorry, but PDF can do everything PostScript can do, if someone with the right tools and skills is using it. And PostScript has taken over the entire publishing industry because it has matured so well.

Stuff like ebooks? Still dominated by a couple of big players (like Amazon) who won't spend a penny on "professional" anything. Some of the uncorrected slobber they sell comes from scans of old paperbacks, much of it has had no copywriting or proofreading--because Amazon puts those costs on the authors, who know nothing about it.

Even with a pro working behind the curtain, if you're producing an Amazon epub and you're told "keep it under 200k in size" corners will be cut. There's just no way to put good vector-based charts and graphics in something that small, and no way to put anything but low resolution bitmapped graphics in it either. There are limits to what even the best typographers--or wizards--can work.

Epub is designed around "make it tiny, make it cheap, make it mass market". PDF? More like saying "Here's the big box of crayons, you go figure out what color you need."

[Macblaze]

Originally Posted by hellosailor

"Pdfs are a real pain to read on any device besides a big monitor. The text isn't reflowable"
Nope. Stop right there.
I knew how to program in PostScript and how to modify PS files to correct errors that had been generated in them. I was an early adopter of PS and worked with a number of folks at Adobe, and was actually instrumental in getting some global corporations to change over from text files to PDF for their global disseminations. I knew it inside out.

...

Epub is designed around "make it tiny, make it cheap, make it mass market". PDF? More like saying "Here's the big box of crayons, you go figure out what color you need."

Well we will just agree to disagree. Sure you can do anything you want in postscript. I am old enough to remember having to fix errors in PS files before PDFs came of age in the printing industry. So what... if you can actually program in PS then you are rare, rare bird in the publishing industry.

Trust me,I have just as big a bee in my bonnet as you do about Amazon and crap books being sold by them and everyone else.

But you cannot yet make a useful pdf equivalent of a highly structure and formatted book that isn't static. Ot at least you can't do it economically. "...make it mass market" isn't an negative in the publishing industry, which explains why pdfs are losing to epubs.

But what do we us dinosaurs (since we both remember sending PS jobs) know about what the consumers really want...

[Buzzman]

+3 for Kindle for novels and non-images publications.

Anythng with images you need PDF for all the reasons posted above.

I use Quark on a daily basis and it converts docs to PDF via Adobe Distiller and rarely get's it wrong.

One of the few instances of this is when I attempt to place multiple layers - say text over image over a background image - and forget to 'fix' them together as a single image before conversion to PDF.

Computer says 'no'....

The main reasons why Adobe InDesign is the most common typesetting/grpahic designprogram these days is down to economics - they undercut QuarkXpress (previously the market leader) by a signiifcant margin, so the 'suits' always choose Adobe.

Designers choose Quark.

It's sooooo much easier / better to use.