Is the Kindle Library Sufficient for Scientific Readers?

[arianabedi]

Hey,

Im an undegrad engineering student and I am really interested in high end physics and meta physics. I also like to read a lot so I've got myself a large number of books that I have to carry around with me.

Recently I decided to buy an iPad so I can do some reading (seeing iphone's "iBooks") but after some research I stumbled upon Amazon's Kindle. It was great since the price was lower and it didnt do the same stuff that my phone and my computer does; it simply did what i wanted it to.

However I looked around their library (kindle book's store) and it didnt seem to have that many books which I would be interested in. Sure they had all the best sellers, but they were mostly novels and such. Not as many scientific books.

So to all you kindle users out there, how do you find the kindle library? do you even use a kindle or you think its pointless or prefer actual books?

-Arian

 

[Borek]

My Kindle experience is very short, so don't put too much weight to my words. However, most scientific books I have seen (be it one with a free license, or be it one that was just pirated by someone) were always in pdf - and reading pdfs is pretty uncomfortable. They are displayed correctly, but because of the way formatting is done, pdf has to be displayed in its native size - so whole page of the book is always squeezed into a tiny display. You can rotate it 90 deg to make it bigger, you can zoom, but that's not what I call convenient.

And it is not only books - every paper I have on my HDD is in pdf - and reading them on Kindle is difficult.

It doesn't matter when the book is in one of the specialized formats (like mobi) as text can be resized and reflowed, so that it always nicely fits the screen.

I guess it will be changing, more and more books are published as Kindle editions, and with Amazon's huge market share there will be more and more. But whether we are there yet...