Nathan and the ebooks of terror

Or books! I could have the top three books I was reading on me at all times, and just pull one out anywhere! I’ll never have to waste another minute of my life! What do you say, Professor McGonagall?

– Harry Potter in HPMOR

Now, I love the idea of e-ink ebook readers. Truly dearly love them, more than I love books, mostly because books take up space: too much space for my tastes. Textbooks, bah: for the few pages I can read in a day, I have to lug around this brick of a book. I do love textbooks, they have all sorts of goodies in them that just don’t show up anywhere else (like technical explorations of quantum mechanics!), but… their mass drags me down (ha! you see what I did there?).

So the fact that my mom is willing to lend me/outright give me her underutilized kindle is kind of a boon for me. Jeepers! A library in my (oversized) pocket! I’ve already put a number of books on it, and its e-ink screen makes me giddy every time I see it.

But the title of this post is “Nathan and the ebooks of terror”, so there’s something negative about my experience: namely, textbooks just don’t fit. “Nathan!” you might be thinking. “Stop pirating books! It’s bad for you!” But, go fetch yon open source math book, and ye shall find the provided pdf shows up with unreadable fonts. Sometimes you can just add a \usepackage{geometry} statement, but sometimes that doesn’t work. Or you can jack up the font size and use \larger, but that doesn’t always work. And then there are the books that don’t provide their source, or provide it in such a way that it’s frustrating to convert it to something the kindle will read (docbook format, I’m looking at you).

I think the best thing would have everything in HTML: it reflows, and it’s hand-editable by pretty much any technically inclined person. Then it’s only a short hop to convert it to whatever format you need, like mobi.

Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen, and I foresee long battles with getting books into my kindle, because gosh darn it, I have a kindle and I’m going to use it.

In other news…

I only have a week of break left! Gosh, the panic hormones are coursing through my body at amazing speeds right now. So much to do, so little time… Like applying to a bunch of internships for the summer (no bumming around for me), doing some cutting for my Huxley (reprap), finishing some code, reading books, getting new books (including pushing them kicking and screaming onto the kInDlE), buying a bookbag (maybe), and figuring out how to make the world a better place. And I’m planning on getting distracted many times, since that seems to happen even when finals are breathing down my neck.

Also, I’ve noticed just how out of my depth I am at Columbia. It feels like I’m really noticing it this time, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to be even more blown away by the end of this semester. There are insanely smart people at Columbia, and the only way I beat them is in non-insanity. Welp.