Just Bought a Kindle - Science Anybody?

[skycastlefish]

Just purchased a Kindle, and I'm pretty excited about it. I spend plenty of time on the road so I imagine the 'text to speach' audio function will translate Hawking's works rather well ;) Do any of you Kindle users have suggestions for any science related texts or blogs/publications?
Adam

 

[TaylorRatliff]

The first thing I read was Carl Sagan's contact (I have a PDF - unfortunately its not in the kindle store).

I mostly use my kindle for reading PDFs, as very few textbooks are available in the kindle store. Amazon also let's you convert PDFs to kindle format, but for texts rich in diagrams and equations the process doesn't work as well.

Reading literature is very nice though.

If you're interested in scanning books you already own, check out www.diybookscanner.org

You don't need to built a book scanner out of anything more complicated than cardboard and ducktape to get good results, especially if you have good software for processing. There are even iPhone apps such as Page Scanner which will do the entire process on your phone, including conversion to PDF with OCR, cropping batches of pages, etc.

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

I mostly use my kindle for reading PDFs.

I am interested in reading PDF's on an e-reader too. Do you have a regular Kindle, or a DX?

 

[Jack21222]

I understand the Kindle has a simple web browser. How is it at reading PDFs from the web? For example, from the arXiv?

 

[mgb_phys]

I understand the Kindle has a simple web browser. How is it at reading PDFs from the web? For example, from the arXiv?

I don't believe it can, it doesn't have a native PDF reader.
you email the PDF to Amazon who convert it to kindle format and send it to your device.
(or i think you can convert and transfer directly form a computer with a USB link)

 

[CRGreathouse]

I don't believe it can, it doesn't have a native PDF reader.
you email the PDF to Amazon who convert it to kindle format and send it to your device.
(or i think you can convert and transfer directly form a computer with a USB link)

I understand the Kindle has a simple web browser. How is it at reading PDFs from the web? For example, from the arXiv?

I have heard that the Kindle has trouble with any complex PDFs, including anything with math -- I don't know if that's trouble with the converter or something in the Kindle itself. I have also heard that the Kindle DX fixes this.

But if it's important to you, don't trust my secondhand knowledge...

 

[WiFO215]

I don't believe it can, it doesn't have a native PDF reader.
you email the PDF to Amazon who convert it to kindle format and send it to your device.
(or i think you can convert and transfer directly form a computer with a USB link)

This is really old news. Kindle came out with a firmware upgrade sometime back that allowed one to access PDFs without having to convert them. To make things better, not only does it read PDF, but the latest firmware upgrade allows one to pan and zoom thereby allowing one to look closely into all those small graphs one might find in all these scientific texts.

Still nothing quite like sitting in a library, but we'll get there someday.

 

[Danger]

Isn't a kindle a stick, one of many, used to start a fire?

 

[Cyrus]

Why not a Ipad?

 

[mgb_phys]

Yes - The kindle 3 and the DX can view PDF natively, sorry I first looked at the original to read PDFs on and didn't buy one because of this.

According to a Q+A on the amazon site
“While you can browse different websites, you would not be able to download any attachments. If for example you’d like to download the .pdf file while accessing your e-mail account, you’d have to save this attachment using your computer and transfer to Kindle using the USB cable."

iPads cost 4x as much, have much shorter battery life and are more difficult to read in bright light.