Of Tablets and PDFs
I have recently begun my quest for tablet that will quench my desire for digital books. Now the books I want to display on a tablet are far different than the books I read on my Kindle. These books are full color PDFs for a tabletop wargame called BattleTech. I already own a large portion of the dead tree books in my library. I am looking to par that down but to also be able to do searches through the books when I need to look something up during our regular play sessions.
I have tested out the the Motorola Xoom a couple of times and they have no dedicated pdf viewer in the system. The pdf viewers you can get for android are not the best. They don’t render the pdfs properly. You also can’t get the Adobe PDF reader for tablets. You can side load the adobe reader apk file to the tablet. Adobe reader is really the best PDF reader for android tablets the bad part is you have to find the apk to download and install. It does have issues with searching but that may be processor related on my phone as I haven’t loaded the Adobe Reader apk to the Xoom Tablet yet.
I was able to barrow one of my co-workers new iPads. I was very impressed with the way it was able to handle the game PDFs. It was able to search and very the PDFs as thought they were dead tree books. The iPad was very good for what I want in a tablet pc to help my game group. Now only if the Android tablets can catch up.
Game Mastering for the first time
This past Thursday I got to run a game with my local BattleTech group. Game Mastering is hard. It takes some practice to come up with a good scenario that won’t overwhelm the players and is fun. I had some mishaps in the game like when I forgot one unit had a special ability, but overall I had a good time and it was a learning experience for me. Going from player to game master is very doable you just need to understand that you can make mistakes.
Paper vs. E-Ink – Amazon Kindle review
I didn’t always love to read. It just happened late into my high school career. I have been enjoying ready for well over ten years. I’ll read most anything from magazines to books and my topics will cover things from bad Sci-Fi books to historical books. Reading is a wonderful past time that allows me to flex my awesome imagination. The journey books can take you on is only limited by your interests and imagination.
I spent the past month reading a trilogy of books called BattleTech: The Warrior Trilogy. Reading all three books sequentially was very rewarding, but to me it also put forth the best test of the Kindle. I enjoyed the fact that I can carry around 900+ pages of text in a light (10.2 oz.) format. During my reading I did “purchase” some free books and samples of other books that interest me. The process was easy to find and buy books. It was a little slow but I only had 2 bars when I was in the store, but speed was not important to me. The kindle lasts about 14 or so days on a single charge without using whisper net.
Of eReaders and iPads
Since the recent eReader price drop between the Nook and Kindle I figured they have hit the sweet spot in price range for me to look into one of them. I played around with a few co-workers Kindles, then I stopped by my local Barnes and Noble to test out their Nook. I found using a Kindle to be easier to navigate. I just felt that the Nook was slow and just difficult to use. The touch screen seems like a nice idea, but I found it to be slow. I decided that I was going to purchase a Kindle after July, that was until yesterday.
The deal a day website Woot! was offering Kindles at a very attractive price I jumped on one. I am excited to purchase an eReader and I purchased the best one available. While some on you may disagree that’s fine. I will be posting a review of my Kindle once I get time to play around with it.
Now before buying the Kindle I was torn between the e-ink readers and an iPad. Now the reason I was heavily considering the iPad is because of it’s support for full color PDF support. To me due to the price of the iPad it is a luxury, for what I want.
Now you must be saying why do you, Joseph, need to have full color pdf support? The answer is simple. Over the last few years I’ve been investing in PDF’s of rule books for a pencil and paper game called BattleTech. I also by the “dead tree” books also since they are portable and can be searched through. The iPad represents the ability to bring those books into the digital age and allow for better portability.
With electronic documents I can bring my whole library of gaming books with me and be able to search through them with keywords. I can make bookmarks to certain sections. This does come back to the iPad “saving” the print media, but it is another outlet to store our larger color electronic media. For me the extra features of the iPad aren’t why I would buy an iPad. After I read up on the keynote the first thing I thought of was that would be so awesome for gaming PDFs.
While it does look like the e-ink readers and the iPad are fighting for the same market share they are two different products. I would actually say they are complementary products to each other. While yes there are apps for the iPad to read your Nook/Kindle books on it that doesn’t mean it is the best option to do so. I like gadgets that help make my life “easier” for my hobbies, and tabletop gaming is a big hobby for me.
