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Mini review: Waterman Past and Present - Kindle edition


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#1 Rocco P

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Posted 09 June 2013 - 06:22 AM

Everyone, who's interested in vintage Watermans, should buy a paper copy of "Waterman Past and Present - the First Six Decades" by Max Davis and Gary Lehrer.

The comprehensive book has 230 pages of beautiful photos of pens and related paraphernalia, including several rare specimens.

The book is available both in traditional, physical format, and from Amazon as a Kindle book.

The Kindle version costs significantly less than its paper based sibling and is a faithful electronic copy of the same.
Unluckily this very fact is its major shortcoming.

Every page of the Kindle version contains what appears to be a scan of the paper one, surrounded by a wide white margin. Text that is easily readable on paper becomes a blurry mess on the small screen of an e-ink based Kindle. Reading becomes a slightly less painful experience on a Kindle HD while it's more than bearable on a PC.
The image-based nature of the Kindle version, as opposed to a true text+images electronic rendition, makes it impossible to enlarge the font for better reading or to search for terms or to select text.

Given all this shortcomings I can't in good faith recommend the Kindle version of this otherwise very fine book, unless you plan to read it only on a PC monitor.

I can and I will heartily recommend the paper version instead. I can only imagine the effort that it took to find and photograph all the different pens there documented, making the book an invaluable reference.

Edited by Paolino, 09 June 2013 - 06:28 AM.

--

Rocco


#2 MacKozinsky

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Posted 10 June 2013 - 05:45 PM

The image-based nature of the Kindle version, as opposed to a true text+images electronic rendition, makes it impossible to enlarge the font for better reading or to search for terms or to select text.

Given all this shortcomings I can't in good faith recommend the Kindle version of this otherwise very fine book,


I couldn't agree more. Below is my (anti)recommendation which I posted at Amazon, as it best describes "what is wrong with Kindle edition of the book".

I knew what are the contents of this book, it's pros and cons as I had a chance to browse through the paper version. But Kindle e-book version is a total misunderstanding - it contains scans of the pages. Why is it a problem? You can't really "zoom in" the view on details or change the font size. The contents stay small and really hard to read regardless of the screen resolution or Kindle options regarding font size or words per line. It's difficult to read descriptions and impossible to read what is there on boxes or advertisements featured in the book. The whole point of my purchase was to have a quick and easy access to all the contents of this book but that's not what I got. Another problem of pictures-only file like this, is that you can't use the the Search feature - another reason why we like e-editions of books in general. You won't get this here.

Poor job done at preparing for publication stage. I can't recommend this edition of the book.


Best Regards,
Mac

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