E-Readers for Academic Reading: Pros and Cons?

[eXorikos]

Hi,

I'm starting my thesis next year and I'll be reading a lot of articles and theses and doctorates and stuff. Do any of you use an e-reader for this kind of reading? How good is it? What are the drawbacks?

Thanks

 

[Pattonias]

I wouldn't see why you couldn't, have you ensured that the journals you need are published in pdf or another common format? I would just make sure that the journals you are looking for are published in the format your reader of choice requires.

 

[eXorikos]

I don't know of a journal that isn't published in pdf. Otherwise there is always a conversionprogram. I don't know the topic yet, but it will be either something in nuclear physics of nuclear solid state physics.

I'm mostly curious if it is nice to read and the graphs and formula are still nicely visible in the text.

 

[S_Happens]

I only use mine for fiction at the moment, or historical/biographical but without any real graphics.

There might be formatting issues with graphics. I have a Kindle 3 and I haven't converted any pdfs with graphs in them yet, so I'm not sure how well the actual kindle format would handle it. If you leave it as pdf, you lose a lot of the features such as resizing.

I would guess that the graphic portion is almost certainly less convienant than on a computer. Personally I wouldn't want to read those sort of papers in such a small form. When it comes to that I prefer textbook sized, or at least larger than most e-readers.

 

[Pattonias]

If you use a Ipad, the pdf will look just like it would anywhere else. On a true e-book reader, you may find the size a little restrictive. Most can zoom in, but the refresh rate on the screen may frustrate you as it would take a little longer than you might like to take a closer glance at a graph. The only drawback I could see would be looking at graphs that need to be rendered in color to be easily deciphered. Also the screen size may be a little small when you compare it to a standard sheet of paper. The nook color may be your best bet. The refresh rate of an LCD and the battery life of a ebook, but not as expensive as the Ipad. The size would be the only problem I would foresee. You could play with one at the store to see if you like the interface.

 

[eXorikos]

If I'm going to spend so much money on an Ipad, I can just as well read on my laptop. I don't like reading on LCD... I also prefer paper, but I want to learn about an alternative.

 

[rshen85]

I bought a Kindle 3 recently for exactly this reason, and like it quite much. In hindsight, I should have bought the DX version though. PDFs are shown properly in Kindle 3, but are too small to be read comfortably in full-screen mode; this shouldn't be a problem in the DX. I normally tilt my Kindle 90 degrees and read articles in landscape mode, this works great, but you loose a bit of the overview of tables and figures. I'm currently trying out a software (Calibre) that converts PDF --> .mobi, Kindle's native format, so that the text can be shown with proper size. The text transfers perfectly, but tables and equations are brutally slaughterd.

I should point out that e-readers are NOT REPLACEMENTS for paper copies. You'll want those to scribble notes in, or to quickly flip between the text you're reading and the appendix/table/figure/equation you want to take a peek at. E-readers are great on the go though, so you can have access to heavy books without bringing them along. It's also pretty convenient to search for "where the #&"! did I read that?".

Kindle 3 works great for books btw. In fact it's so great that I've started reading books again, which I haven't done since I was forced to it in high school (6-7 years ago).

 

[mugaliens]

If by "e-reader" you're referring to electronically-displayed words, I've been e-reading stuff since 1982.

For recreational reading, however, I prefer paper books.