(if you have a 40″ 1080p HDTV…and if your laptop graphics will support the 1920×1080 output)

Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com

While that is extremely useful for work I don’t spend much time reading ebooks on the display as I prefer to use other devices – laptop, Kindle, PDA and in a more relaxing chair.

Paul is absolutely right about refresh rates – they do not apply to LCD’s. Depending on which OS and video card you are using and if it auto-detects your LCD monitor you may not even have the option to change the refresh rate from 60Hz anyway.

Personally, I prefer one big display over multiple monitors when running a Windows OS. I do have a multi-monitor setup at work and use a utility called Ultramon which I find indispensible for window management.

One display that I think may very well turn out to be widely used for ebook reading are HD tv’s. Since the vast majority (if not all current models)offer a pc input it is quite simple to use it for a pc display. Or, rather than hooking up a pc to your tv just use a game console. I frequently use my Wii to read news/weather/sports and the Wii also uses the Opera browser which is very usable with the Wii controller (I do wish Nintendo would hurry up and release a Wii keyboard though as that would make entering text a lot easier).

While that is extremely useful for work I don’t spend much time reading ebooks on the display as I prefer to use other devices – laptop, Kindle, PDA and in a more relaxing chair.

Paul is absolutely right about refresh rates – they do not apply to LCD’s. Depending on which OS and video card you are using and if it auto-detects your LCD monitor you may not even have the option to change the refresh rate from 60Hz anyway.

Personally, I prefer one big display over multiple monitors when running a Windows OS. I do have a multi-monitor setup at work and use a utility called Ultramon which I find indispensible for window management.

One display that I think may very well turn out to be widely used for ebook reading are HD tv’s. Since the vast majority (if not all current models)offer a pc input it is quite simple to use it for a pc display. Or, rather than hooking up a pc to your tv just use a game console. I frequently use my Wii to read news/weather/sports and the Wii also uses the Opera browser which is very usable with the Wii controller (I do wish Nintendo would hurry up and release a Wii keyboard though as that would make entering text a lot easier).

I prefer texts that allow cut-and-paste so that I can place sample passages in my notes that are particularly well written, poorly written, humorously provocative, or retainable for some other reason. One wonderful aspect of the e-books that Tor has been distributing recently is the lack of a crude DRM straitjacket. Text can be expeditiously cut-and-pasted. The full text of an e-book together with my notes can be indexed for search in the future on my hard drive.

The multi-screen setup that Liviu discusses sounds excellent. I have used multi-screen systems in the past and they do help when you are juggling several tasks.

I also sometimes read using a tablet computer with a 14 inch screen. Switching between multiple windows is more cumbersome with a smaller screen but it is doable. When I read using my eBookwise, or bundled pieces of dead tree it is more difficult to consult the web and keep notes.

Much of the discussion of refresh rate does not apply to the liquid crystal portion of an LCD monitor. This is because while a CRT monitor uses the same mechanism for both illumination and imaging, LCDs employ a separate backlight to illuminate the image being portrayed by the LCD’s liquid crystal shutters. The shutters themselves do not have a “refresh rate” as such due to the fact that they always stay at whatever opacity they were last instructed to continuously, and do not become more or less transparent until instructed to produce a different opacity.

The closest thing liquid crystal shutters have to a refresh rate is their response time, while nearly all LCD backlights (most notably fluorescent cathodes, which commonly operate at ~200Hz) have a separate figure known as flicker, which describes how many times a second the backlight pulses on and off.

Have not checked the prices recently, but with a 40$ dual graphics card I added 2 monitors several years ago, so I have 3 – the monitors changed in time, now I have left and right 2 19″ LCD’s and center one of those wide-screens described above.

With Fbreader for XP -keys customized like on my 770, or with Mobi reader, you can display very nicely a book – I usually use the left screen for it and one column since I read by scanning the page