Ebook RPG Books

[El Mahdi]

deleted

 

[Festivus]

That is true. but e-reader are not ment to be computers.
What is your battery life between charges?

That varies a lot depending on what I am doing. With wifi off, no CD activity and display set to low I can get about 6 hours. My ordinary timespan is about 3-4 hours for business use... but remember, I have the large battery (= more weight).

I guess my thinking is... why limit yourself with a reader only when the tablet is a viable option. Cost probably plays a role here, portability, weight too. I don't buy the "electronic paper" kindle argument, you can adjust plenty on a screen to make it more comfortable to read.

 

[Lord Xtheth]

Here an article some of you might like to read about Adobe and e-readers.

Amazon's Kindle winning battle, but Adobe poised to win e-book war

Has anyone here tried the Kindle for RPG books? I've been considering buying one for quite some time, but I want more than Amazon's own canned reviews of THEIR system to go on.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Actually, this one is. The recycling tech for most of those metals is cleaner than paper and the volume is far less. This is actually a case of new tech being less polluting than old tech. That's actually very common, but we'd like to pretend that pollution is a new problem.

The recycling tech is cleaner by far...but the initial mining and refinement is easily as destructive and toxic as anything the petrochem or paper producers do.

From the US Geological Survey
1 metric ton (t) of electronic scrap from personal computers (PC’s) contains more gold than that recovered from 17 t of gold ore. In 1998, the amount of gold recovered from electronic scrap in the United States was equivalent to that recovered from more than 2 million metric tons (Mt) of gold ore and waste.

but...

from the Worldwatch Institute
Of all the gold in use or storage today, two-thirds is newly mined. About two-thirds of this was extracted from immense, open-pit mines in places as far apart as Canada and Papua New Guinea. Once it's extracted, the mine ore is crushed, piled into heaps, and sprayed with cyanide to separate out the gold. Years later, the abandoned waste piles can still release acid and toxic heavy metals into streams, rivers, and groundwater. This is no small matter: the gold produced for a single .33 ounce, 18 karat gold ring leaves in its wake at least 18 tons (20 short tons) of mine waste.
<snip>it's currently impossible to know if the gold we buy comes from a mine that dumps toxic waste in rivers, violates workers' rights, digs up wilderness areas, or evicts communities under the threat of violence.

And that's just gold mining.

Copper is typically strip-mined or open-pit mined, as are some of the platinum family metals (though they are more usually shaft mined). Sometimes, entire mountains get planed off in pursuit of those minerals.

How Is Platinum Mined History Techniques and Photos
Open-pit mining: Definition from Answers.com

Then there is the issue of the crystalline minerals used in high-tech devices. Industrial crystals- like corundum, diamonds, garnets (typically, various forms of YAG), quartz, silicon, mercurous chloride and others - must be mined and/or made it artificially...which (again) necessitates the use of hazardous chemicals in the mining, refining or growth of the crystals.

So, really, no...its not B&W as to which is ultimately most destructive.

 

[falcarrion]

Has anyone here tried the Kindle for RPG books? I've been considering buying one for quite some time, but I want more than Amazon's own canned reviews of THEIR system to go on.

I have the Kindle dx with rpg books on it. What would you like to know?

 

[jaerdaph]

There was a recent poll/discussion over at RPGNet related to this:

Best electronic format? - RPGnet Forums

Personally, I want my eBooks to "look" like the hard copy book (in addition to being able to comfortably read them at the same or similar size). And I want PDFs, not HTML, specifically PDFs that take full advantage of bookmarks and page jumps etc.

 

[tenkar]

Has anyone here tried the Kindle for RPG books? I've been considering buying one for quite some time, but I want more than Amazon's own canned reviews of THEIR system to go on.

I've blogged about some of my experiences with the DX and RPG PDFs. Hit my blog link below and then hit the Kindle DX tag. It should have a list of small reviews.

Quick summary. Most RPG PDFs look quite nice on the DX tho there are some exceptions. Overall it works well for the purpose.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

So, really, no...its not B&W as to which is ultimately most destructive.

I'll concede that it's a little gray.

But do a quick count of how many gold mines there are compared to how many places make or recycle paper. Orders of magnitude in difference. Even if they produce only a tenth the waste per location, if there are thousands more of them doing it, it adds up.

Canada alone puts over 50,000 metric tons of sulphur dioxides into the atmosphere from their paper industry every year, and that's only one of 8 major air pollutants produced, ignoring about a dozen minor ones. Then there's the stuff dissolved in all that waste water, which is actually where the bulk of most of the pollutants go.

Paper mills are also more likely to be in settled areas, so the impact on human populations, at least, is pretty large.

Mining procedures are also containable. They're not polluting because they're inherently wasteful. They're polluting because it's a little cheaper to do it that way than to be careful. The paper industry relies upon water usage second only to agriculture and the only alternative is to clean that water, which would be epicly costly.

 

[falcarrion]

That varies a lot depending on what I am doing. With wifi off, no CD activity and display set to low I can get about 6 hours. My ordinary timespan is about 3-4 hours for business use... but remember, I have the large battery (= more weight).

I guess my thinking is... why limit yourself with a reader only when the tablet is a viable option. Cost probably plays a role here, portability, weight too. I don't buy the "electronic paper" kindle argument, you can adjust plenty on a screen to make it more comfortable to read.

One nice thing about the Kindle is it's battery life is not in hours but days.
I have a laptop for my computer needs. But for gaming as a player I found the Kindle Dx to be a better fit. If I was DMing I would definetly be using a laptop or tablet.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I'll concede that it's a little gray.

But do a quick count of how many gold mines there are compared to how many places make or recycle paper. Orders of magnitude in difference. Even if they produce only a tenth the waste per location, if there are thousands more of them doing it, it adds up.

Canada alone puts over 50,000 metric tons of sulphur dioxides into the atmosphere from their paper industry every year, and that's only one of 8 major air pollutants produced, ignoring about a dozen minor ones. Then there's the stuff dissolved in all that waste water, which is actually where the bulk of most of the pollutants go.

Paper mills are also more likely to be in settled areas, so the impact on human populations, at least, is pretty large.

Mining procedures are also containable. They're not polluting because they're inherently wasteful. They're polluting because it's a little cheaper to do it that way than to be careful. The paper industry relies upon water usage second only to agriculture and the only alternative is to clean that water, which would be epicly costly.

Excellent points.

In comparison, lets just look at one small mining area.

The Carlin deposit, which was discovered in 1962, started production in 1965. Since then, the Carlin area now comprises a major mining district with seven operating open pits producing more than 1,500,000 troy ounces of gold per year.

Combine that info with the info about the ratio of gold/waste, that means that the Carlin mine alone produces 60 short tons of mine waste/year. Refining the gold involves mercury, lead, chlorine gas and other chemicals, depending on the exact process. Processing those materials themselves to a state when they can be used in gold refining means yet more mine waste and byproducts.

While the mines themselves are not in human habitats, a strip mine utterly destroys whatever else lives in the area. If they're not careful- care varies greatly between the mines in 1st world nations and developing nations- heavy metals used in refining easily wind up in the water.

...especially if the mining company doesn't replant/rehabilitate the mine area, allowing the elements to simply erode the exposed land.