Customer Reviews

A Dictionary of Weights, Measures, and Units (Oxford Paperback Reference)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The book itself, "A Dictionary of Weights, Measures, and Units (Oxford Paperback Reference)" is an excellent reference. As a hardcopy book, it would be invaluable. If it had been implemented properly on the Kindle, it would be even more useful. As it is, the implementation as a Kindle ebook is so poor as to make the reference almost unusable.
The problem is that there is no index, and other than scrolling through the entire book it is not practical even to look something up alphabetically. Using the Kindle "search" function for a keyword is barely usable, as the search find every occurrence of a given word in the entire book, without distinguishing between main topic headings, or, say, the initials in the name of an author quoted within some entry. If you look in "Table of contents", there are just 4 entries: Preface, Dictionary, Symbols and Endnotes. Clicking on "Dictionary" just brings you to the first entry, "A", in the entire dictionary. You then have to scroll through the entire book, page by page (about a second delay for every page turned) to find anything.
As an example, I wanted to look up "speed of light". This is often represented by the symbol "c". However, searching the book for "c" comes up with 263 entries, including initials in names, and mostly nothing to do with the speed of light. Searching for "speed" comes up with 109 entries, mostly not relevant, and searching for "speed of light" still comes up with 17 entries. One of them (I later found), the 13th in the list, is the main "speed of light" entry, but it's not distinguished by the search as being a main dictionary entry in any way. It was only by accident, while trying to find something else, that I stumbled independently on this main "speed of light" entry in the dictionary.
If this had been a printed version, I could have found my entry, in alphabetical order, immediately. To try to make the Kindle version somewhat usable, I have now made my own 26 bookmarks, for the start of "A", "B", "C" entries etc., so that at least I can start my scrolling search at the right letter of the alphabet.
This is a great disappointment. It should have been easier to find references in the computer (i.e. Kindle) version, rather than becoming as now almost impossible. My impression is that the original text file for the printed book was just automatically converted to Kindle format with no effort or thought as to how it could be used, as a dictionary, on a Kindle.

We use this book in our business - dealing with clients world-wide - you find terms in documentation, that make you say, "What???". This book helps out!

Plenty of details. However somewhat cumbersome to navigate and not as exhaustive ed.as I expect.

This gives a very authoritive discussion on many of the topics of regular and metric measures.