The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet [LWN.net]

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 5, 2012 11:25 UTC (Sun) by fb (guest, #53265)
In reply to: The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet by anselm
Parent article: The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

> Also, for all its shortcomings, IMHO the PRS-T1 still beats the pants off the (non-touchscreen) Kindle 3, which I also have.

Could you elaborate on what the PRS-T1 does better? I am honestly curious (I never handled one).

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The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 5, 2012 12:01 UTC (Sun) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (5 responses)

The Kindle 3 is OK if all you want to do is read novels from Amazon. The Kindle document format is too restrictive for more demanding sorts of documents (like the technical training manuals my company produces). The Kindle really sucks for PDF files, because you can't use PDF bookmarks to navigate, and anyway Amazon doesn't let you sell PDF books through its Kindle infrastructure.

The PRS-T1 supports EPUB, which lets you use better formatting in your documents. Unlike Kindle-format documents, EPUB documents can be prepared without proprietary tools. The PRS-T1 is also a lot better than the Kindle at displaying PDF. In addition, it has a touch screen and (among other things) supports hand-written notes. (There is a touch-screen Kindle out now, and of course the Kindle Fire tablet, but I haven't had a chance to try either of those.)

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 5, 2012 12:26 UTC (Sun) by fb (guest, #53265) [Link]

Thanks for the instructive/informative comments.

I use a Kindle DX (the pearl e-ink one) for reading A4 formatted PDFs. It does the job really well, but I reckon I only really use it for (relatively short) scientific articles. Larger PDF files will indeed add too much load delay. My old Hanlin v3 had some Adobe licensed PDF renderer that did reflow on PDFs, it was sure better than what the Kindle does or what I succeeded doing using Calibre and cmd line tools (the Hanlin v3 sucked in other ways).

Most of my e-ink reading falls in the 'normal book' category for which Mobi files on a Kindle3 suffices. (One killer feature of the kindle for me is being able to read Wikipedia articles while camping abroad about the region I am visiting, it sure beats any 'history section' of regular travel guides.)

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 5, 2012 20:44 UTC (Sun) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

PDF is a very bad format for e-books, it has the build-in requirement that you be viewing the page on a particular size screen (or you have to pan around the page, which is horrible in practice.

Given that .mobi is a slight variation of .prc, are you sure that it can only be created with proprietary tools? The formats have been around long enough, and are well documented enough that I have a bit of a hard time believing this.

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 5, 2012 20:51 UTC (Sun) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link]

.mobi is created with Calibre with no problem at all.

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 5, 2012 22:13 UTC (Sun) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

PDF is a very bad format for e-books, it has the build-in requirement that you be viewing the page on a particular size screen (or you have to pan around the page, which is horrible in practice.

PDF does have its problems but if you want anything except the most basic formatting then EPUB (2.x) and especially the Kindle format won't do for you. On the Kindle 3, once you get to the point where you need a table that is not 100% trivial you're essentially up the creek without a paddle.

There is such a thing as »PDF reflow«, which the PRS-T1 does but the Kindle 3 doesn't. On the other hand, we have had reasonably good experience with generating PDF to fit reader-size screens, which is very nice on the PRS-T1 but sucks completely on the Kindle 3 because it won't let you use the links in the PDF to navigate, not even by scrolling around the page with the puny cursor keys. (The new touch-screen Kindle may or may not be better in that respect.)

Given that .mobi is a slight variation of .prc, are you sure that it can only be created with proprietary tools?

There is Calibre, but personally I wouldn't really be prepared to call that an authoring tool.

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 6, 2012 9:00 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The Kindle 4's latest software revision, and the Kindle 5, support KF8, which has better table support among other things. The viewer is... suboptimal, though, as so far every single book I've viewed in that format has a different font size to all the others I own, so I'm always having to fiddle the font size to keep things the same apparent size. This is probably a bug which might possibly maybe be fixed (or maybe they've taken a leaf from the music biz and expect us to buy all our books again to get them in KF8 form!)