I’m back. The break was great. We went to Jamaica just before Christmas with my wife’s side of the family, and we just finished Christmas with my side of the family.
It’s time to start doing some philosophy.
The really exciting news is that my wife and my folks went in together and bought me the nook for my birthday (which was on Christmas). The bad news is that I have to wait until January 4 to get my hands on it.
As soon as I get my hands on it, I plan to do an unboxing (for philosophers) and start experimenting with PDFs. My goal is to give philosophers useful information about the nook that I couldn’t find anywhere else.
While you’re waiting for philosophy related Nook reviews, I’ve created a category for all of my previous Nook posts.
If there’s anything you’d like me to test out/explore once I get the nook- let me know
Very cool! I’m quite interested to hear about how these things are for philosophy reading. I’m sort of skeptical to be honest. One of the things I was worried about when researching the Kindle was the lack of page numbers as far as I can tell. Since they want the font size to be able to shift, the whole thing just shows you how much the current font size setting allows on that virtual “page” of the reader. And as far as I could tell, it didn’t even tell you which bits fell onto which page of the printed book. I mean, that’s the way we cite things as academics. What is one supposed to do? But I await the review!
My dad got the nook for Christmas (his was delivered on time), and I was playing around with his a bit.
Something interesting: the page your on shows up in the bottom right as something like 4/350 to note that you are on the fourth page out of a 350 page document.
When you click to the “next page” it sometimes stays on 4/350. My dad had the type set to “Medium” – My hypothesis is that there is a background static page number, and when you increase the font size from medium to, say, large – it will take more clicks to get to the next static page.
If that is indeed the way things are set up, then academics shouldn’t be too worried about pagination on an ebook. I’ll test it out more when I get mine and let you know.
(I’m more worried about how PDF content will render. My concern is that the screen will be too small, but we’ll see)
Still waiting for that review. 🙂
I am worried about exactly the same things that you are worried about. I am a PhD student and my field involves lots of tables, figures and equations. I am waiting for a good ebook reader which could make my life easier by being rendering the PDF content in an easy to read fashion.
Anil,
I’m on it. I’m going to start posting stuff here soon.
Here’s a preliminary report. Text based PDFs that are type set by big publishers play pretty nicely. Formatting for most major journals is preserved when you view them at the smallest font setting.
The text is very small, but legible.
When you increase the font size on articles from newer journals, it actually resizes the text for you – but it reflows in a kind of funky manner. I found that, if you’re going to increase the text size, then you show go to one of the largest settings, and the reflowing is not as jarring.
However, if your field involves lots of tables and figures – I’m not so sure.
If you’d like – send me a couple of sample PDFs – I’ll load them on my Nook, snap pictures, and let you have a look.