in news:3c5c1a60$1@news.povray.org Mitchell Waite wrote:

> Question for this group. How do you feel about a book in a PDF format
> and how do you feel about buying eBooks vs paper based books.

I do not realy like them. Have some from fatbrain (I think). Reading 
(PDF's) from a screen is not as comfortable as reading from paper. 
Especially when it's in a manual form and you want to have other 
programs opend along with it to do the excercises. 
Also printing 100+ pages, double sided, always seems to give problems. 
Blank pages that are not counted as a page for some reason, printer 
eating an extra page etc. It's not a proces you can start and then walk 
away. Also the if you want a good quality print, you could get a real 
book for the same price probably.
Another problem I had that when I transferred the PDF's and keys to a 
new machine, I couldn't get access to the document anymore.

Reagarding "real books", I don't like paper backs. A real binding is 
preferred. Also, in case of a manual / tutorial, you should be able to 
put the book flat on your desk, without pages to start flipping by them 
selves. Even if you open the book on the first page.
Another aspect of real books is the paper quality. It should be heavy 
yet not thick. It should be smooth yet not glossy. Raytracers seem to be 
night animals, so chances are that the books will be used with 
artificial light. Many satinated and glossy papers have the problem that 
areas of the text get unreadable due to "highlights", especialy with 
(fixed position) artificial light. A paper I like is the one used for 
Bentley's "Programming Pearls 2nd edition", Stoustrup's  "The C++ 
programming language 3d edition" is already to glossy.

Ingo

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