Ryan Waggoner

> Has anybody _exclusively_ begun using ebooks?

I have. I got a Kindle, and I love it. It's a no-brainer for me. I move relatively often, like to travel, and commute to work by train. I mostly read non-fiction books that are all (or mostly) text.

Re: e-readers vs tablets

The e-reader will give you less physical strain due to the lighter weight and e-ink screen. And less strain = more pleasure, while reading. It's the strongest benefit of e-readers over tablets.

If you read books with mostly text and read in a linear fashion, then get an e-reader. Examples are: most paperback books. If you read books that require a large viewing area, color images, or strong navigation features (for non-linear reading), then get a tablet. Some examples are: textbooks, magazines, technical books.

Ideally, you'd get an e-reader for paperback-type books and a tablet for the media-rich or reference books.

Also, this fellow HNer wrote an article on switching to e-books: http://ryanwaggoner.com/2010/11/how-i-read-more-by-getting-rid-of-my-books/

I didn't write anything about doctors. I just submitted the link. Each comment here is submitted by a different hacker news member.

The reason why I submitted the link is because over the past few days there's been a lot of articles on hacker news about how to work as a freelance coder. One of the routes they spoke about on those articles was to apply to craigslist jobs for freelance work.

http://ryanwaggoner.com/2010/10/how-to-become-a-freelance-web-developer/

They mention quite specifically to avoid jobs that have very few details on the job page (or the follow through page) and especially wary of ads that offer shared ownership.

Since your ad matched that criteria I thought it would be interesting to submit it to the community and get the general thoughts in it.

FYI - Hacker news is a community where thousands of coders hand out. They use this site to find and promote articles they are interested in.

I've had that for awhile and it's actually pretty controversial with the HN crowd...every time one of my posts hits the homepage there's a thread of comments about whether it's appropriate :)

If you're interested, it's the WP Greet Box plugin for Wordpress: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-greet-box/

I'll be blogging more in Feb and March about what I'm doing to grow the blog aggressively, but it has less to do with communities like HN and Reddit (which have been amazing to get me going) and more with building subscriptions. So if you're interested in that kind of thing, you should...subscribe :) http://ryanwaggoner.com/feed/rss/

I thought this was a good post:

http://ryanwaggoner.com/2010/08/why-free-online-education-wont-replace-traditional-college-anytime-soon/

Presents an interesting case against a lot of technical Utopian ideas about tech/ed, highlighted the resistance to change in a lot of entrenched interest groups e.g. parent pressure isn't stressed nearly enough by most. It is a well thought out articulation of an interesting POV.

I really wasn't trying to be content police, just concerned that a post that essentially says "I Bought Something" was the most interesting technical news of the day ;-)

Absolutely. I use a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner[1], along with the software that comes with it. Automatically OCRs both sides and then stores it on disk. I don't even have to name files as they are full-text-searchable in Finder on OSX. Check out Ryan Waggoner's post[2] on this (where I got the idea from).

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001XWCQO2/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=nicksergeant-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=B001XWCQO2

[2] http://ryanwaggoner.com/2010/11/how-i-filled-two-dumpsters-and-went-paperless-with-the-fujitsu-scansnap-s1500/