E-reader as a text editor?

[Grond]

I don't own any e-book reader and I have basically no knowledge on the features offered by the different models. I was wondering, can any of those run a text editor and support an external keyboard? I think that would make a nice way for writing text, with an e-ink screen and distraction-free.

[mintberryminuscrunch]

the positive effekt would be reversed by the tiny screen

[Ekaros]

Not realy good idea. Partial update of screen isn't too nice looking and full update is tad slow and also bit bothersome. It isn't realy so distraction free when it updates, but as you do it once per page it doesn't matter as you can take tiny-break between pages.

Eink can be any size, bigger is just sold less so the control electronics are more expensive and bigger.

[webwit]

I love my e-reader. I don't think any support what you want though, out of the box. Also although mine has a touch type keyboard to take notes and even a stylus for drawing and handwriting, the screen is just too slow to be really usable for inputting larger texts.

ereader.jpg (151.23 KiB) Viewed 6261 times

[sordna]

What's the best e-reader for someone who cares mostly about PDF and text documents? I tried the Kindle but it rather sucked for that.

[Ekaros]

PDF's are hard, probaly some bigger model like DX...

[nathanscribe]

DIstraction-free text entry is what I use my Alphasmart Neo 2 and Tandy WP-3 for. The Tandy hooks up to my DOS machine via serial port, the Neo to my Mac via USB. The battery life on the Neo is something like 700 hours, so no fear of it giving up on you half way through something important.

[sixty]

I am pretty fast on my kindle.

[mrog]

What's the best e-reader for someone who cares mostly about PDF and text documents? I tried the Kindle but it rather sucked for that.

A while back I went for the Sony PRS650, partially based on its better than kindle PDF support.

If you view a pdf on the Sony at size 'small' it'll render the pdf as normal, if you do any other size then it will attempt to 'reflow' the pdf text, allowing you to zoom in/out without having to pan left and right constantly while reading.

The attempt to reflow is never perfect however, but it is actually still the best pdf reflowing I've managed to find.

Using Calibre to convert pdfs to other formats generally is a bit rubbish, and Amazon's PDF converter service (you email then the book and they convert it) is also pretty poor.

Generally speaking pdfs are difficult to manage on the ebooks, but side by side the Sony beats the Amazon Kindle.

As a final note, the new range of Sony ebook readers now use android as their base OS and I can't comment on how well they work. But an interesting point to consider is that with a rooted Sony ebook reader you can install the Amazon ebook reader application and get the best of both worlds!

[woody]

PDF's are hard, probaly some bigger model like DX...

I read PDFs on DX practically fine, considering the limitations of the Kindle.

[Lustique]

Do these e-readers display equations (in pdfs, something like this) properly (or other vector-based things), or are they only able to display "normal" text?

[sixty]

It works on the kindle, but the kindle has piss poor PDF support. Basically it handles all PDFs as raster images. There is no zooming and panning.

[woody]

Do these e-readers display equations (in pdfs, something like this) properly (or other vector-based things), or are they only able to display "normal" text?

PDF is simplified PostScript. So, yes, it should display everything.

Kindle displays PDFs fine. There are few levels of zoom ("fit-to-screen", 150%, 200%, 300%, "actual size"), panning with the cursor nub, and fine panning with Shift + cursor nub. No problems with tech, musical and even scanned PDFs so far. But that is on DX, which is the only size/resolution I'd think about reading PDFs on.

@sixty: have you updated the firmware?

[Lustique]

It works on the kindle, but the kindle has piss poor PDF support. Basically it handles all PDFs as raster images. There is no zooming and panning.

Ah ok, thanks. I was wandering whether they are able to do this, since I am considering to buy an e-reader for some time now, so I don't have to turn my PC or laptop on if I want to look something up in my rather big ebook-collection (mostly textbooks) or lecture notes and such.

Do these e-readers display equations (in pdfs, something like this) properly (or other vector-based things), or are they only able to display "normal" text?

PDF is simplified PostScript. So, yes, it should display everything.

Kindle displays PDFs fine. There are few levels of zoom ("fit-to-screen", 150%, 200%, 300%, "actual size"), panning with the cursor nub, and fine panning with Shift + cursor nub. No problems with tech, musical and even scanned PDFs so far. But that is on DX, which is the only size/resolution I'd think about reading PDFs on.

@sixty: have you updated the firmware?

That's nice, I was just wandering, because to me it seems that e-readers somehow only display "modified" pdfs or display them in a different manner than normal PCs (at least that was the impression I got from various pictures of e-readers displaying something).

There isn't really a market for cheap, slightly used ones, is it?

[trax]

New Kindle Fire is cool.