[ExI] Ebooks Formats and ebook readers

[Alejandro Dubrovsky]

On 12/11/11 02:17, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> I am considering getting a reader so I donät have to drag so much
> cellulose with me everywhere I travel, but I have one constraint: I must
> be able to read PDFs with equations and diagrams (and ideally djvu too).
> Since this list community knows things, what are your recommendations?
> Get a general purpose pad with PDF reader, or is there some eink
> solution that actually works?
> 

I'm not aware of any e-reader solution that "actually works".
But:
Sony's e-readers can handle some PDFs. What you can do when they can't
handle them is convert them to .epub or whatever with calibre which is
quite good. As a last resort, for things that calibre can't handle, you
can convert them to .epubs (or .mobi I'd assume too) made up completely
of images, making 'pdftohtml' from evince/poppler do all the heavy
lifting.  Both .epub and .mobi are basically packaged up HTML, so
putting each page as a HTML page consisting of one image is almost
foolproof, even though not useful for searching and relatively slow.

I have written a hack stealing from calibre that converts to an .epub
made of images custom made for converting an old scanned journal that
came in two columns format to the Sony PRS 300 (which I have sadly
lost). It should be only partially disgusting to customise it to other
inputs and outputs:
http://organicrobot.com/ale/converttoimageepub-0.3.tar.gz

In my experience, reading from the e-reader is a much better experience
than reading from the tablet, I think mainly due to weight and glare.