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Comment by jtbayly | Hacker News Reader

I have a $70 ebook (Amazon Kindle) of an academic work (not a textbook) and it is practically unusable. So many problems compared to the physical book. Never again.

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I've found that a ton of older books published as ebooks were clearly just OCR'd and then not thoroughly edited. Definitely frustrating.

Handling complex material has never been a priority for the Kindle. To be fair, more recent iterations have improved support for things like tables and MathMl, but it’s still a work in progress.

With my adhd I learn programming drastically better on physical books. Stupid I know, but it helps drastically to see it on paper.

Sadly it’s either crazy expensive, or not even an option to get paper for newer frameworks

> Stupid I know, but it helps drastically to see it on paper.

Not stupid at all. Myself, and every single colleague of mine that I know (pure mathematicians) have to print every non-trivial document that we really want to study deeply.

I'm reminded of 'edw519, and his habit of printing out source code listings to work on without losing focus. See e.g. http://static.v25media.com/edw519_mod.html#chapter_49, and then CTRL+F for "print" from there.

I used to do this all the time in my early career. Stopped at some point.

Probably when I stopped working on really hard things and started working on complicated things that touch tons of files.

Going to try this again. It was really helpful

The biggest problem I have with it for textbooks is just how slow the fucking thing is to scroll between pages. Which is a key operation for a reference material.

I spent $100 on a textbook on kindle, then just pirated the PDF for this reason.

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