Survey posted 2005-06-07 05:54 by Jon.

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Yes I do. I travel by train about one hour a day, so I have the time. Project Gutenberg (especially the german one) is a great source of free texts, I downloaded about 90% of my lecture from there, converting it using ebook studio.

I mainly read classic german and english stuff like Shakespeare or Goethe. For more modern stuff, I still use 'real' books.

I put some chapters from Chapterhouse Dune and Heretics of Dune on my 83+ before to make it easier to read in class when I was done with work. That was over a year ago by now, but it was fun. :)

I think the concept of an e-book is cool, but its not easy to read on such a small screen. So i would rather stick to a good old fashioned book. Not to mention, my English teacher has some strange superstition about calculators and technology in general. I pulled out my 83+ to find my class average one day and she asks, "why do you have out"? "It has nothing to with my class". So i explain to her what im using it for. She nods and walks away. About 2 minutes layer, she comes up to me and says, "Put that away, before I take it AWAY!" She is such a queer! God I hate Mrs. Gant!

In elemantary school I got books confiscated all the time...I think my record was 15 in 5 minute during spelling class. I would lose books in my desk and then just keep pulling them out when I found them if one got confiscated...only had my calc confiscated twice

I do not understand this calculator confiscation thing. Other people in my classes got them confiscated all the time, but I just sat there playing Tetris & doing matrix calculations, & nobody cared. Perhaps it was because I always did well on tests...it seems teachers often relax their policies if students do well. Favoritism...bleh.

Doing matrix calculations?

Yes...it seems that no matter what I try to do with mathematics, matricies always pop up somehow, for example in Fractional iterates & color space conversion.

I wonder how much memory it would take to put books like Tom Clancy's "The Bear and the Dragon" or Stephen King's "It" on an ebook. I bet it would take megabytes as both books are >= 1100 pages.

Anyway, it would overrun the memory in our calculators (maybe excepting the HP 49g+ with the SD memory slot, but none of us have THOSE, right ;) ) and be a 2000-3000 page affair. Ouch!

I do not know for sure about those books, but I do know that the NIV Bible is about 3.79MB, & can be compressed to under 1MB (but with a PPM variant, unfortunately).

Hmm...bZip2 does almost as good, but it still takes a bunch of memory to decompress. Perhaps one could compress each chapter separately & use a common dictionary for all chapters...that might get it small enough while still being easy to decompress.

How'd you get them on the calc? Typed them into the computer by hand?

Can't say I'd want too... Why waste the battery power? Also, the contrast would be hard to deal with. Eboooks aren't for me I'd just prefer to go rent it from the library :P.
Also there's the fact that I can't find anything to read most of the time any ways.

Rent from the library?

I love the eBook reader-ma-jig. It's rather more entertaining than any of the games, at least until you run out of the books you want to read. It'd be nice to see some Douglas Adams, Christopher Moore, Turtledove... you know, stuff not in the public domain, so forever removed from our ability to see published here... unless i'm wrong.

Make me more books! muah hah hah hah!

Not forever...unless they keep extending the term for copyrights (which they should not do - the term is too long already). Currently copyrights last 95 years (I think - & it depends upon whether one person or a company owns the copyright).

I've converted several books from paper form to Notefolio, but mostly so I wouldn't be burdened with carrying around my calc, AND an outdated piece of hardware called a text.

The calculator is the perfect place for Of Mice and Men, since the book is about the same size as a calculator, anyway, and the 4 parts snugly fit in appvars, when each part is split into two 15 KB pieces (8 parts).

A sample chapter can be found here:
http:// geocities.com/ jvdthwip/ MICMEN41.zip
[remove spaces]

eBooks are also useful for storing vital information during a Math or Chemistry test!