Superpatron

Scientist gadgets - carrying your research library with you everywhere?

If you are working in a field where new materials are being published regularly and where there's some sense that collecting and reading the whole canon of that field is key to your efforts, portable electronic document readers are appealing.  They offer the illusion that your entire research library - at least the portion of it that matters - can be with you everywhere.http://vielmetti.typepad.com/superpatron/2008/10/arxivmobi---phy.html

Here's a piece of that discussion lifted from the blog NEQNET: Non-equilibrium Phenomena, in a piece entitled 251. Scientist’s gadgets: Kindle 2 vs. Palm

Although Tungsten T3 was costly, I neverregretted that purchase. The thing turned out to be reliable (in fact, it is still with me, it works fine after 8 years of rather extensive use). I have read thousands of e-books and papers from arxiv.org on my Palm.

If you read further you see lots of discussions of how to convert materials, primarily complex PDFs downloaded as preprints from the net, to formats suitable for use on handheld machines.  The Kindle gets low marks for its ability to handle any kind of open formats, and the Kindle 2 is better but not enough better to make it an easy choice for arXiv readers due to limits on its PDF import and conversion process.

(An earlier post on reading arXiv on an iPhone led me here.)

Reading on your phone (from The Book Is Dead)

as noted on read20-l

from the weblog The Book is Dead, where the author describes the experience of reading an electronic book on the iPhone.

So I spent 6-7 hours reading on the iphone - probably the longest continuous stint I’ve done - and it was fine! In keeping with the state of the brain 30,000 feet up, this was no high-literature, but a page-turning saga featuring the cliched activities of one Jack Reacher. But I digress. In between meals and kid-wrangling, I read the whole thing, and the only time I remembered it wasn’t a paperback was when I could slip the iphone into my shirt pocket rather than trying to cram it into the overstuffed seat pocket (why do airlines insist of giving you printed drinks menus, shopping guides, entertainment guides etc - leaving no room for the stuff you really *need*). And by keeping my screen brightness low (but still plenty bright enough in the half-light of a plane cabin), the battery was still two-thirds charged on arrival.

I don't think I could have done all of this on my phone (screen too small) but it's an interesting observation: there is some set of literature that works pretty well on mobile phones, at least in the very rare case where you are sitting with nothing else to do for six hours and you're disconnected from the net. 

My typical travel pattern is the bus, not the airplane, and for that the mobile phone is a perfect companion.  What would be the literary canon for this size device?  You should be able to put something that someone else would welcome being read to as well.

I consulted my companion of the afternoon, and he suggested The Cat In The Hat.

I looked for an authorized ascii edition of The Cat In The Hat, and didn't find one; but I did find an ever so slightly imperfect bootleg from 1987 in the archives of the newsletter of The Cult Of The Dead Cow.  A quick cut and paste to my personal wiki, and I was all set to sit down and read it.  And, what do you know, it worked pretty well.  The three year old in question had seen the pictures enough times that he didn't need them to enjoy it, and it was short enough at about 1300 words to fit on one page.

More to follow - and while I'm not sure how this turns into a market for picture-less picture books, I know that I really could make good use of this in a lot of situations.