Comments on: Are e-books ready for technical content?

By: David Lang

David Lang — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 04:50:27 +0000

I read a _lot_ of stuff on my kindle, some of it very much like what is being described, and I find that there are versions out there that work well and ones that don’t

in any case, there’s no good reason to not make the material available in existing formats just because a particular format is not perfect. sometimes the convienience of having the text available (and searchable) vastly outweighs the loss of all formatting and diagrams, so a plain text version would be worthwhile to have.

By: David Lang

David Lang — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 04:45:41 +0000

exactly because the screen is so small.

it’s also considerably more expensive than a simple e-reader

some people will want all the other features and not care about the screen size, but others prefer a device that is good for reading, even if it means carrying an additional device.

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 02:48:12 +0000

Why waste time on a single-purpose devices like an ebook when there is already a solution that allows zooming, text, color images, animated graphs, video, etc? I’ll admit the screen is small, but iPhones and iPod Touches are a perfect solution, not to mention wireless download and sharing capabilities.

By: Ahmed Hindawi

Ahmed Hindawi — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 08:15:14 +0000

It is not true that epub is insufficient for technical materials and high quality typography. I have posted a few samples at http://www.hindawi.com/epub.html that contains lots of mathematical equations and graphics and some tabular materials. epub is capable of embedding OpenType fonts (which makes me surprised when people complain about the lake of a fixed width font for computer codes) and also supports Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Almost anything you can do in a PDF, you can do in epub using SVG.