A Bit of Electronic Advice
Nov. 13th, 2021 07:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
These days an enormous amount of old occult literature is available in PDF format. For ecological reasons, I'd prefer not to print out everything on paper, and it gets old having to sit at my computer desk rather than lounging on the couch, so I'm considering picking up some kind of electronic e-reader for the purpose. The difficulty, of course, is that I'm about twenty years out of date when it comes to technology and I have no idea what's available. What I'm looking for is a simple device that will allow me to read PDFs. I don't want it to be connected to the internet if I can avoid that, and I certainly don't want it to be dependent on one of the big predatory internet firms; I can get all the books I want from archive.org and iapsop.com, and I'm not averse from using USB drives to get them to my e-reader.
Do such devices exist? Have you used one? Would you recommend it? Inquiring Druids want to know.
(If I can get it used, that would be a plus -- I prefer to get all my technology that way, to keep things out of the e-waste stream..)
It's a personal thing....
Date: 2021-11-14 01:37 am (UTC)Surprisingly I found the weight a big problem with even "lighter" tablets, which I have problems reading anyway. The Kindle is geared towards reading, of course, and doesn't have color. You can manually load books/files on to it via USB, but of course it's more user-friendly when staying inside the Amazon moat, and downloading things from their website.
It supports the mobi and newer Amazon formats, and PDF, txt, doc and html - BUT NOT epub. However, I use Calibre on my Linux desktop to convert EPUB files as necessary. The charge lasts a few weeks, though mine is 5 years old now and the charge isn't lasting quite as long. You can get them used/refurbished on Amazon's web site for under $100 (some I see for $60 out there).
Mine "only" has 8 GB of storage, but that's plenty since I hook it up to my PC at least once per month, and most books and docs are only a few MB.
My advice would be to see if you can borrow some other ereader brands, or a tablet if you think you may like that (a lot of people love to surf on their tablets). I'm not a fan of Apple products, but they are very popular as well. I'd prefer to have a bland, monochrome Android device with Calibre embedded on it, but I don't think that exists.
Re: It's a personal thing....
Date: 2021-11-14 05:01 am (UTC)Re: It's a personal thing....
Date: 2021-11-15 04:35 pm (UTC)