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How many people have libraries over 3000 books large, anyway?
Counting all my SF and fantasy books I have about 4200 between my office, basement, and attic. That is the result of collecting them for almost 30 years though.
My library is on the small side. When I was getting my Masters I pretty much relied only upon checking books out of the library. Now I buy a book from time to time, but I normally get it used from Amazon. Books can be pretty pricey, and they're a pain to transport when you move.
I found many great deals on used books at Amazon. I think I've only checked out 2 book from the library since going to school. I need a bigger study room. Either that or start installing bookshelves in the kitchen.
Two books? What in the world do you do if you only need to consult a book for a page or two in it? Do you buy the thing?
No, I'll just work in the library a while. The only time I take them out is when I have to read the whole book. If it's a topic that interests me a lot or I know I'm going to be consulting it often, I'll just buy it if it's not available online.
I have an older one, still has wireless however and has been a real blessing. The only thing I don't like is that the majority of my school books are not in Kindle format.. not their fault, but it would be great if they were. The other thing is there are a lot of older books that are not converted either.But all in all it has been great… will be wonderful to not have to worry about where to store all my books. Access to the open source libraries, free books on Amazon as well as paid ones makes it well worth the money.I'm currently reading “Lies My History Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong” by James W. Loewen.
I am currently rereading the Anabasis, which I downloaded in Kindle format for free from Project Gutenberg. There are over 38,000 free books for kindle on Gutenberg alone.
Have you read any big PDF or ePUB files on it yet? If so, how is the page turning and can you search or go to a certain page number without any problems?I ask because I hear all these ereaders are crappy with handling PDF's especially scanned ones which is what I have most. There is a program that converts them (Calibre) to ereader formats, but even that's iffy.
I have read a few pdfs, you can go to page numbers but searching is kind of difficult. The PDF files I generated with work better than scanned ones though. I havent used any epub files yet but they are supposed to be supported.
I have Calibre installed and it has converted some OK, but most of them don't come out perfect. I had a copy of Cole Youngers autobiography and it's readable, but with some garbage in it…
The Kindle 3, which I have, does not require file conversion to make PDFs readable. As far as I am aware, all the Kindle versions currently sold by Amazon support PDF Reading. According to Amazon, these are the file types natively supported: Kindle (AZW), TXT, PDF, unprotected MOBI, and PRC. What is awesome is that you can send any file type to amazon at a personalized email address for your Kindle and they will convert it for you and send it on to your Kindle automatically. I have already done that a few times.
Notch, can you create bookmarks in a file that's not perfect?
Yep… I have a bunch of PDF's and they can be bookmarked. The ones that are a bit rough can be, but you most certainly have to go through the document and not count on the TOC at all…
Ski, the key to PDF files is that ones you have scanned in probably need to go through some OCR program. Normally, when you see a PDF file on JSTOR or some other academic database, it's already been through OCR so you can highlight words, search for phrases, etc. I know that the full Adobe Acrobat program has OCR built in that you can run, but otherwise there are some free OCR programs out there that can help you.
