Here's another question. For reading books (fiction, science fiction, fantasy, biography, etc) I have almost exclusively moved to Kindle.

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Here's another question. For reading books (fiction, science fiction, fantasy, biography, etc) I have almost exclusively moved to Kindle.

However for technical books I'm undecided. I'm looking at some C++ books (I know but the topics immaterial to the question) and whether to get eBooks or Paper books (the reason for the third item is that for Nick Hodges book's I have both, 'cause I'm greedy).

So what should I do...

Comments

  1. David HoyleDecember 23, 2016 at 2:03 PM

    Zoran Bonuš Can you get technical audio books? Might be a great way to stop insomnia :-)

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  2. David SchwartzDecember 23, 2016 at 9:33 PM

    The problem I've found with most programming books is their formatting sucks. And I despise reading them in Kindle because you have to flip pages; PDF files at least scroll and you can see code that spans two pages at once. Code examples in Kindle are laborious to read -- they're often a larger font (or seem so), they word-wrap poorly, the indenting is often too much relative to the width of the layout they're given, and I find that they're just hard to read.

    I find PDFs produced from materials formatted for standard 8-1/2" x 11" (or A4) pages are FAR easier to read than the same material in Kindle format. Unfortunately, most book publishers who sell PDFs produce them in the same page size as the printed books. Kindle ebooks bear no resemblance to the printed version, which I guess is supposed to be a "feature". It's fine for reading a novel with no images, charts, or other distractions. But where the code is the central feature, it's a major drawback, because I find the code really hard to read.

    It's even worse that people seem to price their eBooks at just a few dollars less than the print versions, both of which I consider unreasonably expensive most of the time.

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  3. Bill MeyerDecember 24, 2016 at 9:16 AM

    David Schwartz PDFs which are formatted 8.5" x 11" when the book was 5.5" x 8" are of course utter nonsense. But e-book formatting is problematic, at best. Almost all books which have code samples on the page are exceedingly frustrating to read, as the code seems inevitably to wrap, and badly.

    However, in general, e-books seem to be given very little attention by publishers. And there are those, too, which the publishers clearly prefer not to sell; Amazon sets the s=weet spot for price by giving the highest royalty for $2.99 to $9.99 -- a publisher who prices above that mark cuts the return in half. When you see a paperback at $15.99, and the Kindle price is $13.49, the publisher clearly wants to preserve their paper business. It's their right, of course, but unless I really want the book very badly, I often decide not to buy, for that reason.

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