Even the original publishers have trouble with those. I was going to buy the ebook version of "Proofs from the Book", but downloaded the sample first from Amazon, and it was completely worthless. You'd have a line that would say something like (S in the following represents a capital Greek Sigma):
S( ) <= S( )
where there were supposed to be things inside the parenthesis.
I checkout out a few other serious math books for Kindle, and although most weren't as bad as the above, I'd usually find some deal breaking errors in the handling of math symbols. For instance, I seem to recall one that would lose exponents of -1 if they were attached to a small letter. I didn't see anything else wrong...but it was an abstract algebra book, and it is customary to use multiplicative notation for groups, an so a^-1 is the customary notation for the inverse of a. Group theory gets very confusing when a^-1 gets replaced by a.
At this point, I don't think I'd buy a math book for Kindle even if the preview was flawless unless I was very sure that the preview included every mathematical symbol that would be used in the book, and in all the sizes they would be used in.
I've been reading quite a lot math books on a Kindle recently, but I didn't bother to convert them to a native format -- I've been using PDFs.
Because of that, I needed to convert a DjView file to PDF a few times. The thing is, I have yet to find a good djvu2pdf converter -- they create PDF files with ridiculous sizes, like 100 or even 500 MB and they are terribly slow. I got better results in terms of size when I tried printing from djvu viewer with PDF printer, and while the file size was good (10-40 MB) and quality was acceptable most of the time (depending on the initial quality of djvu), it was so goddamn slow and resource intensive that I stopped doing it altogether and went back to dead tree books -- converting ~400 pages djvu this way took about 3-4 hours on 2 years old laptop.
Also, my Kindle was really, really slow showing them -- turning pages took about 10 seconds. Everything else was fine, though -- math books aren't really meant to be read fast, so this was not a big problem.
Even the original publishers have trouble with those. I was going to buy the ebook version of "Proofs from the Book", but downloaded the sample first from Amazon, and it was completely worthless. You'd have a line that would say something like (S in the following represents a capital Greek Sigma):
where there were supposed to be things inside the parenthesis.I checkout out a few other serious math books for Kindle, and although most weren't as bad as the above, I'd usually find some deal breaking errors in the handling of math symbols. For instance, I seem to recall one that would lose exponents of -1 if they were attached to a small letter. I didn't see anything else wrong...but it was an abstract algebra book, and it is customary to use multiplicative notation for groups, an so a^-1 is the customary notation for the inverse of a. Group theory gets very confusing when a^-1 gets replaced by a.
At this point, I don't think I'd buy a math book for Kindle even if the preview was flawless unless I was very sure that the preview included every mathematical symbol that would be used in the book, and in all the sizes they would be used in.