My gateway into books
I didn’t read a lot when I was young. Still I liked to look at pictures. My mom had this policy that when we were in a bookstore I could get one book for free. Mostly I read “How and Why Wonder” books about lost cities, treasures, electricity and what not.
Slowing getting into books
When I was about thirteen I actually read my first book. It was a book about computer hardware. It was very basic but I loved it. At the same time I started to build my own computer and my friends also did so. This was the time when I started to understand how a computer works. Rather fast, I bought and read my first book about programming in Turbo Pascal. And I remember my first program which was basically a text adventure.
I need to know
Then my reading habits stalled for a while. I didn’t read many books but mostly read online tutorials about photoshop and html. Still I wanted to learn more and more.
The next boost came when I was 18. Somehow I felt that now I can read books which are meant for adults. I started to read tons of books about programming, software development and project management. Then I started to read books about personal development and philosophy. When I entered college my interests went more into economics and about two years in I started my 111 books challenge and read since then. Nowadays I read about 40 – 70 books a year.
The magic of ebooks
When I started working I didn’t want to carry books around. Thus, I started using ebooks with the Kindle and it was pretty nifty. Slowly, I didn’t buy hard copies anymore and just read on my kindle, later on my kindle app.
PDFs and ebooks
Today, I read most of my books with amazon’s cloud reader which is an online kindle app. The great thing about it is that it is easy to use, isn’t resource intensive and you can mark & leave notes. I love this.
Why I was writing scientific papers I worked a ton with pdfs and this feature would have been great. Then I worked with pen & paper.
Is there are cloud reader for pdfs?
I looked for a kind of cloud reader for pdfs because I started to work more with pdfs but there isn’t any satisfying solution, so far. The beauty about the cloud reader is that it is organized and you can get your notes pretty easy. Working with mac preview and notes / marks doesn’t feel so good.
Here’s the deal. Build an online book reader which accepts formats like amazon ebooks, epub and pdfs. These files are hosted on your platform and can be synced to a mobile app. All notes and marks are organized by your software. Profit.