Comments on: So, I just bought the FoxIt eSlick reader

By: lance_

lance_ — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:28:37 +0000

Hi Erik,

Fantastic! Thanks for the news! Looking forward to it.

By: Erik

Erik — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 04:30:10 +0000

Good news, I’ve tested the new firmware for epub and eReader(which now has 700,000 titles on Barnes and Noble). It should be ready in about 2-3 weeks for the public.

By: lance_

lance_ — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 09:37:34 +0000

Hi Case,

I’m a little surprised you returned the Kindle. Yeah, the DRM sucks, but it’s the cheapest way to buy books and you can strip the DRM.

That’s a good analogy. The eSlick still feels like an early adopter device because they haven’t added epub support yet. That’s the biggest reason I don’t recommend it to my friends. Once the new firmware comes out, that’s another story.

By: Case Larsen

Case Larsen — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 04:53:12 +0000

I just received the latest shipment of the eSlick reader. I had purchased (and returned) the amazon Kindle version 1 18 months ago. Couldn’t accept the DRM restrictions.

I think ebook readers are still in early stages, like where laptops were in 1993, but I’m going to be an early adopter.

By: lance_

lance_ — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 03:07:15 +0000

Hey Pascal,

They just finished shipping the last of the second round of US preorders. A couple Canadians have had their orders shipped but not mine yet.

The first few of the second round have already arrived. A couple reviews are filtering in on the foxit forums, I like this one in particular.

You can bet I’m going to be reviewing mine once I get it, especially checking how well it does on complicated research paper PDFs.

By: Pascal Forget

Pascal Forget — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 01:42:11 +0000

Hello! After some delays, I got an email from sales last week, telling me that the units were going to be shipped early this week… Anybody received their unit? Today is April 24…

By: Grace

Grace — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:49:29 +0000

Kindle has been instrumental in propelling e-reading. And when you’re hot, you’re hot – here comes the state-of-the-art Kindle 2. It is a vastly upgraded version of the original Kindle with some extremely amazing features and is sure to satisfy modern reading needs.

Please visit our website http://www.kindle-2.org/reasons-why-you-should-buy-kindle-2

By: Gary

Gary — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 12:37:43 +0000

OK, here’s a tip. Do you use LaTeX? If you do, you can use the pdfpages package to strip whitespace from around the text in an existing pdf document. Say you have a pdf with a large blank marginspace around the text. The following LaTeX file will make a new version. Unfortunately, it will lose any bookmarks, links etc. I usually run it with pages={-8} to process just a few pages, tweaking the offset and scale values until it’s stripping out the bits I want, then change back to pages={-} or maybe a different page range to strip out any guff you don’t want. It’ll also let you glue together multiple pdfs into one file.

\documentclass[a5paper,oneside]{book}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\begin{document}
\pagestyle{empty}
\includepdf[pages={-},offset=0mm -5mm,scale=1.3,pagecommand={}]{“pdf_file_name”}
\end{document}

By: lance

lance — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 10:40:14 +0000

Hi Gary,

Glad you got a discount but sorry to hear you didn’t get the same deal.

I gave Feedbooks a try and I think I’m likely to continue using it to convert my blogroll to PDFs. GutenMark I’ve used for a while and I’ve been very happy with. Calibre looks great as a library manager but unfortunately the converter doesn’t output to PDF. The author is on MobileRead and appears pretty approachable, I might put in a feature request.

Hope you get some good use out of the eSlick, I’d love to hear any tips you come up with!

By: Gary

Gary — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 10:26:49 +0000

Hey Lance, just letting you know I contacted Erik and ended up ordering my eSlick a few days ago. I didn’t get a 20% discount, so you did well there, but Erik helped me out a little.
I just did a test, on the Feedbooks website, of downloading a Gutenberg text and a Creative Commons licenced text as custom pdfs. It generates these on the fly. I set up a 92mm x 122mm screen size with 11px (sic) Palatino font with 5mm of whitespace all around and it looks lovely. I’m looking forward to seeing how good it looks on the eSlick. I’ll probably play with GutenMark and Calibre too.