Cheap perl e-books

[Kieren Diment]

On 27/08/2009, at 11:29 PM, Dirk Koopman wrote:

> Paul Makepeace wrote:
>> On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Philippe Bruhat
>> (BooK)<philippe.bruhat at free.fr> wrote:
>>> On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 01:21:24PM +0100, Peter Corlett wrote:
>>>> Then again, I generally swear off paper books for a while  
>>>> whenever I've
>>>> just moved house and my arms are six inches longer from all the  
>>>> weight.
>>> But you also swear them off before the move, because when looking  
>>> for
>>> a new house you had to take into account the length of walls  
>>> without a
>>> window, a door or a heater, that are needed to accomodate your  
>>> shelves
>>> (and also the ones you'll add later on).
>> For exactly these reasons and so many others: ebooks ftw. I'd be
>> delighted if/when they become the norm and thanks for O'Reilly for
>> doing this.
>> Paul, can read ebooks way faster than paper ones & searchable...
>
> But not ebooks are not easily random accessible, nor speed (as in  
> flip) read nor available with convenient figure holes so that one  
> can cross refer between different sections of the book, more or less  
> at once.


About 25% of what I do for a living is read stuff, so I'm a pro.

And about 25% of what I have to read I have to do in sufficient detail  
that I have to either obtain a hard copy or print it out (in booklet  
mode of course).

Skim.app on OS X is close to a nice screen reader (especially the  
split pdf function), but paper wins a lot of the time unfortunately.

The first outfit with a good quality ereader that I can afford that  
supports both .pdf and .txt (platform independent line endings of  
course) and supports easy cross referencing has my money.