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I've captured quite a bit of attention with my first nook eBook Reader and PDF Documents article. With my creative use of metadata and article title, I've captured more than just my normal VERY casual virtualization audience. I have actually received a few follow-up questions that I can address with a second review, which digs a bit deeper into bookmarks and scanned OCR documents.

The first request that came across was around bookmarks and highlighting and taking notes. When it comes to the PDF functionality of the nook, there are several notable missing features. First the "Highlights and notes" option is simply missing in action. Granted, I have yet to use this feature in a standard eBook, but with technical documentation or research PDFs, I see this almost as a vital option. Also noted as missing, is the "Look up word" feature.

Next, I wanted to dig deeper into the bookmark capabilities. In a regular eBook, the bookmarks are stored in the nook as their Chapter and page number. I'm currently re-reading Stephen King's The Stand, which unfortunately doesn't seem to have proper chapter marks so the whole book is one single (and super long) chapter simply called "Cover". For this book, my current bookmark is called "Cover: p. 165". Easy to understand if the eBook was properly rendered.

In my PDF, I get nothing even close to as friendly. My book is properly rendered for chapters as a part of the PDF I constructed. I can select any particular chapter from the "Go To" option in the menu. The major problem is that when I add a bookmark, it uses some fancy PDF markup, which makes absolutely no sense. In my case, I bookmarked a page describing VirtualCenter licensing on page 100. When I went to return to this bookmark, the nook instead threw out "5,#pdfloc(2506,99) at me. TECHNICALLY, my PDF page numbering seems to be off by 1. Page 99 of the PDF is displayed as Page 100 in the nook. It still doesn't explain what the heck the first portion of information is that it is throwing at me.

The final question thrown at me was around scanned OCR PDF documents. In the case and samples provided to me, it appears to be college research. I was presented with 2 documents of similar quality, one that was just a seemingly normal 1 column PDF with no highlighting. The second document was 2 columns and had Acrobat highlighting and annotations embedded in the document. The standard single column document rendered extremely well, as can be seen in the sample photos below. Paragraph breaks were properly aligned and the only weirdness I ran into was when one PDF page ended in the middle of a sentence, the nook would show that as cut off on half a page and continued on the next full page. Not a big deal and still quite readable.

Where the wheels fell off the bus is when I tried to view the 2-Column PDF that had highlights and annotations. I do not know if it was the highlighting at annotations, or if it was the multi-column rendering of the nook, but it was largely unreadable. On some pages, the document scaled down to fit both columns onto a single page, and on others, the nook properly rendered multiple pages and scaled a readable version for a few pages before flipping back to a scaled multi-column view. On the scaled pages, there was also an instance of random shadowing behind some of the text, which made it literally unusable. In the first image below, you see the situation where the document scaled onto the page. The second instance is zoomed in to see the shadow text. I had to use a slow shutter speed to low light, but you should be able to see the difference between my horrible camera hand and the text shadowing.

As a last-ditch effort, I decided to try to use the highly touted Calibre to convert the documents from PDF to ePub. By converting the PDF's to ePub, I again gained access to the "Highlights and Notes" and "Look up word" features within the documents. The problem was the formatting was garbage. There were random paragraph breaks that would split paragraphs mid-sentence and all kinds of page break issues. Calibre also had NO idea what to do with the multi-column OCR document and simply turned the document into a 3-Page document, which was the text leading up to the first multi-column page. I admittedly need to dig deeper into Calibre before stating the program was to blame, but I was better off from a readability standpoint letting the nook internally convert the PDF documents, albeit with missing features.

Again, Jeff hasn't stepped up and offered me a Kindle just yet, so can't really do any comparisons against what the Kindle can do with PDFs with its latest updates. Anyone willing to test, I'm more than willing to share source documents to get a good subjective review of both devices.

I was one of the first to jump on the nook bandwagon when Barnes and Noble announced it. It arrived last week while I was in Europe so didn't get a chance to really start playing with it until yesterday. One of the first things that people started to ask me was "How is the PDF performance". I had a chance to load up the only "real" PDF eBook I have... The VI3: Advanced Technical Design Guide. I figured this was a good test for several reasons.

1. I wrote it, so I know it's formatting and layout inside and out
2. It is big. Weighing in at 814 some odd pages let's me judge performance
3. It has a lot of images splattered throughout the book

Copying it to the nook from my Mac was as simple as connecting it, and dropping it onto the "My Documents" folder on the nook's internal memory. I've read reports on the internet that you cannot use external memory for PDFs since the nook itself locks the location to the "My Documents" folder. Hopefully a 1.1 firmware option allows you to specify any folder on internal or external memory.

Overall I am very impressed. It took about 5 seconds to format the 11 MB document and display it on the screen. Page turns take between 1 and 2 seconds, which is not a big deal to me. Overall the nook does a fantastic job of splitting pages of text. It does keep the PDF pagination in place. The nook keeps the current and total page count in the upper-right hand corner. If I am on a page of the PDF that gets split into two nook pages, the page count i the corner stays the same until it hits the next PDF page. This is great for TOC/Index purposes. If I set the font to "Small", it keeps a very clean 1:1 page mapping of PDF to nook, but it is TOUGH to read. The default of "Medium" looks great and is highly readable.

Images formatted extremely well. We do have some issues that are actually native to how the PDF was compiled for the printer. We have some images that were properly saved to the source document as flat PNG files, and we have other image files that were saved as layered images (Source Visio). These layered images get messed up by the Adobe compiler, and you can see the results on a few of the images in the print book. Can't fault the nook for our mistakes.

I've attached the following images that I snapped to give people a good idea of what PDF support looks like. As I flip through (100 pages in so far), I haven't come across any issues that makes me say "Holy crap, the nook sucks", and in fact feel the exact opposite. The nook is damn impressive for what it is...an eBook reader. Too many reviews on the net are trying to review the nook as the second coming of Christ, which means Barnes and Noble marketing did almost too good of a job (Bravo!)

If I can just convince all the virtualization authors out there to do a PDF exchange with me, I'd be a happy man (Looking at you Hal). Click for larger images below...and I'm sorry for the high ISO/grainy quality. The lighting in my office sucks and the flash just didn't look right bouncing off the touch screen display.

If anyone wants to check out and compare the eBook on a Kindle or Sony, I've attached the full book PDF at the bottom of this article (I've already given the whole thing away for free with individual chapters anyway). Enjoy!

I got sidetracked on Twitter tonight with a conversation between @jasonboche and @vmdoug, and since my wife is out of town visiting family I figured what better way to spend a Saturday night than to write a quick PowerShell script that can calculate the number of unique permutations based on 2 criteria.

First is the total number of available elements.  in this case, we were looking at the number of available URL combinations on bit.ly before they would "run out".  Without spending any more than 15 seconds investigating, I determined that bit.ly uses only alphanumeric keys, but is case sensitive.  That means we have 26 uppercase letters, 26 lowercase letters, and 10 integers (0-9).  That gives us 62 total elements.

The second criteria is the number of total elements used in the combination.  In this case, bit.ly still uses 5 character URL strings.

The math behind this is something that I actually still remembered from high school oh so many years ago and is P = n!/(n-r)! where P is the number of Permutations, n is the total number of available elements, and r is the number of elements used in the combination.

Borrowing a function from stackoverflow.com (The nested loop calculation was pissing me off so I had to cheat), I was able to put together the following PowerShell script that can rather quickly do basic permutation calculations.

function factorial( [int] $f ) 
{ 
$result = 1
if ( $f -gt 1){
$result = $f * ( factorial ( $f - 1 ) )  
}
$result
}
 
function permutation( [int] $n, [int] $r )
{
(factorial $n) / (factorial ($n - $r) )
}
[int] $n = Read-Host "Total number of available elements:"
[int] $r = Read-Host "Total number of elements in combination:"
 
if ($n -ge 1 -and ($n - $r) -ge 0) {
permutation $n $r
}
else{
Write-Host "Invalid input parameters"
} 

 

So, when all is said and done, by using this script we can determine that when using 62 total elements in 5 element combinations, bit.ly currently has 776,520,240 URL combinations available.  if they were to change to a 6 character URL, the number jumps to 44,261,653,680, in addition to the 776,520,240 combinations from their 5 character URLs.  I think its safe to say that as long as the bit.ly database can handle the load, we don't need to worry about them running out of URLs any time soon.

I want to give a special thank you to Jason Boche for getting me all wrapped up in permutation calculations around the number of possible bit.ly permutations before they will need to add a 6th character to their strings (776,520,240 for those interested).  He through out a tweet mentioning my math skills and to check out my free chapters.  At that point I quickly got that sinking feeling in my stomach which quickly reminded me "Holy crap I'm behind".  Without further ado, I give you a two-for and introduce Chapters 7 and 8 from books 1 and 2.