From the Baseball-Reference blog:
Working with John Burnson of (Heater Magazine), we are pleased to make available The Baseball Reference Player Folio. This is a set of five pdf files specifically formatted to work on your Amazon Kindle.
We are currently offering these files as a free downloads. The files are built using the data in the Baseball-Databank.org, and while we have made every effort to make sure there are no errors, on a project of this size, errors can and do occur. Also, these files have only been tested on the Kindle, but we expect they will work on other platforms as well. To read PDF’s on a Kindle, you must have a Kindle 2.or Kindle DX. You must also have version 2.3 of the firmware. …
I don’t know anything about baseball so I can’t comment. Thanks to Wired Correspondent Erin Biba for the link.
I’ll check’em out and report later; those are big files.
A quick heads up: it is hardly a secret that pdfs formatted for readability on kindle should work equally well on pretty much every other eink reader out there.
Okay, I checked them out.
Verdict? Not bad at all.
As a casual baseball reference it is a fun browse and the pdf is one of the few good experiences I’ve had with pdf on an ebook reader. The content is limited mostly to classic baseball counting stats and batting average and ERA, but it does add in a couple modern stats like OBP and SLG and WHIP.
As an electronic document it behaves more like a decent epub than a pdf; the adobe viewer abstracted a browsable table of contents, the links worked, zoom worked (90% allowed a nice margin and readable text).
Given the tabular nature of the content reflow is counter-indicated so pdf is not inappropriate but I’ll be trying to convert the files to epub and mobi just to see what happens.
I can see myself calling it up the next time anybody dares hint a contemporary player might be the best ever. Cause the numbers don’t lie: Babe Ruth was a god on the diamond. 🙂
Dear Felix, I might mention that along with being the home run king, he was also the strike out king. The god on the diamond had feet of clay. 🙂
Besides, as a Red Sox fan, I can’t let a casual reference to our “curse” slip by without a comment.
Hmm, I thought Nolan Ryan was the strikeout king. 😉
I’d expect a bit more love for one of the best lefty pitchers in Sox history. 94-46 with a 2.28 ERA and 107 complete gaames is pretty good, no? Right up there will Bill lee’s 119-90 with 3.62 ERA and 72 CGs.
Going to take Lester a couple years to get his stats up there, no? 😀