Scott, I haven’t seen an e-paper screen for myself, but since it functions by actually shifting the pigment in and out of view, in theory the technology should be capable of matching ink on paper for viewability. How well they’ve implemented it is another question…

One day!”

I agree. I should have mentioned this in the post. I have a bad habit of putting lots of post-its in my books, then never going back and actually taking notes on what I posted. If I could quickly cut&paste little bits – I could even endure some annoying DRM thing that stopped me at 300 words, so no one can just rip a whole book – my scholarly life would be significantly improved.

The Kindle does allow highlighting and commenting, and you can use your PC to import that text to another word processor. It’s still a good deal clunkier than making notes on a hard copy, but does allow you to achieve the “keeping engaged” effect. You can also get a quick list of links that lets you jump to any of the places you’ve highlighted or annotated, which is nice. The thing I find most annoying about the highlighting feature is that because of the page-based display of the Kindle (i.e., you can’t scroll line by line, you can only turn the page), I often have passages I want to highlight that span the page break. This leads to two separate highlight entries rather than a single continuous one.

I think the biggest design blunder of the Kindle is the lack of any ability to organize your library into the equivalent of folders or playlists. I can’t understand why they didn’t provide something so obvious, when they tout the device as holding the equivalent of 200 books. Yes, you can list the books in alphabetical order by title or author, and jump to particular letters (or use the search function), so if you know what you’re looking for it’s not difficult to get to it. But bibliophiles like to browse their libraries and want to be able to see a list, say, of all the novels in their collection, or all the law review articles, etc.

The wireless feature is great. Any time you get an email with an attachment you can simply forward it to a dedicated email address and it shows up wirelessly on your Kindle, usually quite quickly. Pdfs that were created from electronic documents tend to work fine, ones that were scanned are more of a problem. The best conversion in my view is from Word files. If you download cases or law review articles from Westlaw in Word and send them to your Kindle, they come through perfectly, with functioning hyperlinks to footnotes and headnotes.

I haven’t used any other eBook reading device, so can’t compare. But I do find the Kindle very useful. There are still respects in which dead tree technology is superior, but the ability to carry around and have accessible this much reading material is huge.

The particularly successful reader would have some feature where you could switch those annotations to endnote-style comments, then import them through your PC or Mac to Word or another word processor.

One day!

I’m not sure if this is supposed to be a criticism of the Kindle, but…who cares? Ultimately the Kindle may die. Apple may come out with an iPod reader application that kills it. Laptops might become so thin and cheap that a dedicated reading device is superfluous.

The question is: are you willing to pay $400 today for the best thing going, knowing full well that in two years it will be a hopelessly antiquated piece of junk. For me, the answer was yes.

(Also, the e-Ink electronic paper really is much easier on my eyes than an LCD screen, so I’m not quite as sanguine as others on the notion of portable computers becoming general purpose reading devices.)

A limited screen, functionality, etc. I can live with, working on the assumption that they will get better with new versions. But unless it’s an open system, I’m not sure it’s going to stay around.

I’m not sure if my last post is still in the queue, but I’ll repost regardless.

I have two of the smallest of the fujitsu’s (the P1510 and the U810) and while they are good machines, they aren’t quite what I’d really like for extended reading.

The P1510 is a great little subnotebook, although unlike some I do find the active LCD is a serious strain on my eyes after a while. Also, the machine is still pretty thick when in tablet mode.

Nonethless, I have a huge library of pdf articles on it, and I use it at home as my desktop with a basestation and bigger screen and keyboard. The battery life is an issue: even with wifi off, brightness down, and little software running, I rarely get much more than two hours off the standard battery, and frankly didn’t do a whole lot better than that with the extended battery (which adds a bit of bulk).

The U810 is crazy wacky small, and the screen is remarkable for the size, but it really is small! I am used to small keyboards, but even so, this one is just too small for any significant use beyond a bit of data entry and the odd email (it’s small and a bit flimsy, but the primary problem is the doubling up of various keys, which makes effective touchtyping pretty unlikely for all but the most committed and nimble-fingered users who want to relearn a keyboard).

Also, I’m no guru, but I am a longtime linux hobbyist, and getting linux or bsd on these machines continues to be a challenge for me, especially getting the wifi and touchscreens up and running (granted I haven’t devoted a tonne of energy to it, but still).

So, I like the fujitsus, but I’m not sure they’re yet all that great for reading onscreen, and it isn’t clear the tech could get much better on that front without going the route of the Irex Iliad and the like.

As a laptop the P1510 is great, but I cannot see that functional laptops could get much smaller (although they could get a lot thinner), and again, for folks like me, the active LCD screen is a real issue when reading for any length of time.

Thus I’d still like a very thin reader with heaps of memory, eink-style touchscreen, decent annotation and modest web-browsing capabilities, no proprietary silliness, wifi, oodles of memory and network-related slots, and extraordinary battery life.

What you do is email the PDF to an address similar to the one for the $.10 conversions. The converted file is emailed back to you, and then you have to get it on the device via USB or whatever.

The PDF situation would be a lot better if people created Kindle-friendly PDFs using a custom paper size that matches the screen dimensions.

I two of the smallest Fujitsu’s (the P1510 and the U810 or some such number). I have tonnes of articles and a couple of ebooks stored on the P1510, and I also use it as my home computer with a basestation and an external LCD screen and keybord. I find myself reading off it a bit when around the house, but unlike some I do find the active LCD screen strains my eyes after a while, especially in some light settings.

The U810 really is sleek and compact, but the screen is very small – a fantastic toughscreen for its size, and it’s fine for reading in tablet-format in a dim and relatively intimate setting (in a seat on an overnight train or flight, or in a library or the den), but in general the damn thing is just too small for anything other than a portable wireless webbrowser and occasional pdf article reader. The keyboard is a remarkable feat of engineering, but it isn’t quite usable (I can type on it if I have to, and I’m accustomed to small keyboards, yet even for me it’s tight, and the doubling up of key functions is far too clumsy to be useful for anything but occasional data entry or emails. What’s more, I find myself ending up really hunched over trying to read the screen while typing). The battery life is impressive, especially when the wireless/bluetooth is turned off.

The P1510 is just the right size for writing/reading around the house, or on a train, or in the airport, or the library or cafe, and while it looks and feels a bit clunky for something that size (it’s still pretty thick as a tablet, and by looking at it’s dimensions you just think it ought to feel far more sleek and less blocky), it is reasonably portable – about the size of a medium-thickness hardcover book (just looking at my shelf, it’s a little thinner and comparable size as Lee Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics, and slightly bulkier overall than Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism, in case anyone who cares has either of those books lying about). But the power demands are not inconsiderable, and even with the screen brightness turned way down, no wifi, and pretty much nothing but winedt and the OS running, I can never get more than 3hrs from the standard battery.

Finally, getting Linux or BSD on these things has turned out to be nontrivial for me. I’m no guru, but I am a longtime linux hobbyist, and getting the wifi and touchscreens running is a real exercise.

Thus I’d still like a much thinner, passive eink-type thing with incredible battery life and lots of memory-related i/o slots, and wifi, just for storing and reading papers.

“though hopefully sans-DRM—another academic requirement, if I have to manually re-type copy a sentence or paragraph out to cite in a paper, I’ll get very upset very quickly”

amen.

The problem of scanned (eg JSTOR) pdfs is of course even worse. OCR is a possibility, but it can be an awfully big job. An easy partial fix would be for a reader like Kindle to offer a 90-degree rotation, a la iPhone, for reading such documents. It’s far from ideal, especially for multicolumn text, but it’s at least readable.