Saturday, November 27, 2010

Electronic technical books will win quickly

I've been lying in the hammock reading my ARRL Handbook and noticed the CD Rom in the back. It turns out they give you a complete copy of the book in PDF format.

Dragged it over to iTunes and found that it is very readable on the iPad. One problem, dear ARRL publishers, is that the files are simply called 01.pdf, 02.pdf and so on, with no metadata. Happily, iTunes can edit the metadata quite easily (although it seems to feel that it's editing music files).

front.jpg

Reading such a big heavy book on the iPad is much nicer than trying to hold the big heavy book up, plus you get search (well, within each chapter).

PDF is OK but the text can be a little small, it would be great to have an ePub version. Quite frankly, I never want the physical book again. It won't be long before most technical book buyers feel the same way I think.

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