Re: Cost of printed books (was Re: Online Books)

On Thu, 17 Jan 2002 10:36:02 -0000, "Niall Litchfield" <n-litchfield_at_audit-commission.gov.uk> wrote:
>What I *would* pay money for is the manual collection in Palm doc format
>together with a search function. I accept that you could only load one or
>two manuals at a time into the device but it could be a real boon.

I presume you have one or two manuals in mind, otherwise you'd spend a lot of time deleting one and hotsynching another. Assuming you could do something like this, at the chapter level, which would be the most useful chapters that you would download? (Or does it really depend on the situation?)

My experiments with this technique ran up against the limited search once the text was on the Palm. E.g. after converting PDF->text, I found that the search was along the lines of a "Find" operation in the browser, with the entire book treated as one giant web page. (So finding a sensible match might require repeating the search dozens of times to get past the table of contents, introduction chapter, etc.)

I have not laid hands on a PocketPC, but I hear they have more memory and miniature versions of viewers for familiar doc formats. Not sure whether anyone would switch PDAs just to read product documentation though! (I wouldn't give up my folding Palm keyboard.)

Although now that I try it, a Google search for "palm pdf viewer" does turn up some likely-looking hits, so perhaps no conversion is necessary.

John

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