- Banned
- #21
Over the last couple of years we've managed to get rid of over 100 boxes of books from our rather extensive library, the idea is to get rid of them faster than we bring them in. Why books? The wife prefers hard copies over backlight induced eye strain so the downsizing is slow going in the book department. I've tried unsuccessfully to get her to go with an e-reader but to no avail.I tend to download very, very, very little of anything and I can read pdfs online if I really need to (which is extremely rare) so it's not a high priority for me.If you're talking about Pubs you'll have to ask Stagger, he's the authority.............Does the E-Pub file system download quicker than the pdf crap? I have no idea why anybody still uses the Adobe crap, but a lot of them do, and it sucks.
As for pdf readers, I rarely use them any more, heck I don't even think I have one loaded on this laptop yet, haven't had a need.
I use the pdf a lot because I do a lot of downloading from HEARTH, Google Books, and archive.org., at which most files are optically scanned and it's necessary to use it. They convert to text and several variations, but whatever they're using to convert from optical to text thoroughly sucks, destroys the formatting and punctuation, and makes it a pain it the ass to reconstruct tables and the like. I haven't tried the E-Pub or a couple of the other readers yet, but hope they're better than the 'plain text' and the pdf junk. If I want to cite something, I usually have to download both the pdf and the text,.
I have an old Kindle I can plug into my PC and move pdf's and other files back and forth to. There are a lot of 'out of print' books and magazine articles out there that University libraries are engaged in scanning and uploading to archive.org, Project Gutenberg, etc. I want to get before they disappear for whatever reason, so I can have them offline and carry around. Far cheaper than buying reprints from Google and the University presses.
I bought mine at a garage sale, one of the first models they sold or maybe the second, and it holds tons of files, a lot of mine run into the 800 to 1200 page optical scan files, and texts are a lot smaller and you can still see the images and photos. A tablet is of course a lot better with the bigger screens, and I plan to up grade to one of those, they're not too expensive at the moment. She would be surprised at what they hold and how convenient they are; I have my entire office lined with shelves, and waist high+ stacks I have little paths through to get to my desk and the shelves at the moment, and if I could get them all in files I would toss them in a heartbeat.