Originally Posted by Ripplinghurst

1. It badly needs USB 3.0. Sync can take hours. Literally. And I have a quad core running at 3.2GHz+, I am transcoding music to 128Kpbs and it takes a long time.

A fix for your number one issue is this: Stop converting your music. Uncheck that 128k option. It is not the USB speed that is taking so long, its because it has to convert all your music! And yes, that takes HOURS.

I can also clearly hear the inferior quality with headphones of my downsampled music library.

Yeah, I may have to try to do that. I have a 200GB song (lossless and up to 320kbps mp3) collection, that may restrict my playlists a lot. I'll see what happens. I last copied 40+GB of songs though, I had the option " (_) automatically fill free space with songs" checked...so maybe I was copying extra songs I don't even know what criteria iTunes was using....

Page numbers aren't consistent in print books unless they are all the same edition anyway.

That's why when you cite them, you must state which edition you are referring to.

Originally Posted by Ripplinghurst

If you go to college and/or you want to build in your own library I would strongly advise against investing on e-books (unless they're in pdfs), as they are right now.

.

I completely disagree. I have a library of over 2000 real books. I have been a college professor for 25 years and counting.

I own two Kindles, three sony e-readers and two ipads.

Other than textbooks, I have purchased ebooks exclusively. My library is rapidly becoming dominated by virtual works.

Your concern about page numbers is trival and frankly unimportant. Citations can be done in any number of ways and your insistence on all versions having the exact same page numbers is somewhat strange.

Care to share how do you cite an e-book in a paper? I'm curious.

Originally Posted by Ripplinghurst

Care to share how do you cite an e-book in a paper? I'm curious.

Hi I basically just registered here to try and help with your question as I too was wondering the exact same thing!

I live in Australia and I am seriously considering purchasing the ipad to assist me with external university studies at Murdock University here in Australia.

I have been researching the capabilities of the ipad which led me here to this forum - to see what the actual users think and more importantly what students think.

You brought up a very good point about referencing/citing e-books. It is an important issue for any student! - a shame that professor did not get back to you as he of all people should know!!!

Anyway I found out for myself. At Murdock University they have a page in their website dedicated to explaining all the different styles of citing references and under each style they tell you how to cite references/ bibliographies from e- books.

I am in Australia they might do things differently but i would imagine most Universities and colleges should take into account referencing e- books etc.

i will add some links for you to check out but this forum will only allow me to post links after I have made 3 posts

......continued..
on the website, When you click on each referencing style for example chicago or vancouver or ieee etc footnotes etc it takes to to that page and includes a section on how they want you to cite electronic references and e -books etc.

for example I clicked on vancouver style and then under the Electronic Documents section it has this note

Note: When you cite an electronic source try to describe it in the same way you would describe a similar printed publication. If possible, give sufficient information for your readers to retrieve the source themselves.
If only the first page number is given, a plus sign indicates following pages, eg. 26+. If page numbers are not given, use paragraph or other section numbers if you need to be specific.
An electronic source may not always contain clear author or publisher details.
The access information will usually be just the URL of the source. As well as a publication/revision date (if there is one), the date cited is included since an electronic source may change between the time you cite it and the time it is accessed by a reader.

... then further down it gives examples of how to reference e- books, by reading this it sems to me that the actual page number is not important but getting the edition right is and date? (but not sure as I am not a student yet and have not learnt about bibloigraphy and how to cite references.)


I hope that this helps in some way!

.......here is an example of what they want using the Vancouver style of citing references from an e -book

E-Books

Standard format
#. Author A, Author B. Title of e-book [format]. Place: Publisher; Date of original publication [cited year abbreviated month day]. Available from : Source. URL.

1. van Belle G, Fisher LD, Heagerty PJ, Lumley TS. Biostatistics: a methodology for the health sciences [e-book]. 2nd ed. Somerset (NJ): Wiley InterScience; 2003 [cited 2005 Jun 30]. Available from: Wiley InterScience electronic collection.

2. Sommers-Flanagan J, Sommers-Flanagan R. Clinical interviewing [e-book]. 3rd ed. New York: John Wiley & Sons; 2003 [cited 2005 Jun 30]. Available from: NetLibrary.


I am sure your colleges and uni should have similar pages in their websites explaining how to cite refernces fo re -books

also, thanks for your review because it prompted to look into this!

.......well this is my 3rd post so here is that link I could have added to the first one!


How to Cite References

It is pretty cool there is a section to explain which style to use etc and it seems there are international standards so we all do it pretty much the same way!