I was thinking of buying an Amazon Kindle or similar ink e-reader so that I can use it to view reference material downloaded from the internet. The reason that I want this is for comfort and avoiding eye-strain which I get when I spend a lot of time in from a PC. Is it possible to copy and paste text from a web-page into a document, save it to appropriate format and use it on the Kindle? Is there any software that can easily convert offline internet pages (downloaded from httrack) into a format to use on the Kindle?

Just save the webpages as PDF with a small paper size. Kindles support PDF.

^ Right, I read PDFs on my Kindle all the time (before it went missing. )

My Kindle (Fire...) is "my tablet." I use it for everything that I need in "a tablet," and do not feel second-fiddle to anyone for doing so. (And it don't bother me a bit that I spent so much less than my "tony friends" did ... although, full-disclosure here, I do own an (early) iPad for software development purposes.)

@sundialvcs He said an e-ink Kindle. They are indeed more comfortable to read and they don't suffer from glare or screen scratches.

Thanks to all who replied. I am looking for an e-ink reader rather than tablet to avoid eye strain from reading documentation for long periods of time. I think I'll go for a kindle.

My Kindle works well for viewing pdf's. Sadly, one of my many (unfinished) projects was converting the many Notes I have captured with my favorite browser (Opera) to .pdfs with a page size formatted to my DX. So far I've only converted a small fraction of the several thousand notes I have accumulated but they work well.

In my case I used windows software (Acrobat 9 Pro Ext.) that I already owned from a previous venture to format an empty .pdf page of the right size, add a form field and then insert the text. Scribus MAY be able to do this on the linux side but I'm not sure.

One thing I did, that you may consider, is that I converted the link for a given web page that I had captured to a QR code and put that in the .pdf along with the text. These days I almost always have my Nexus cell phone with me so if I want to do a quick inspection of a page to jog my memory I use Google "Goggles" to read the qrcode and enter it into the phone's browser.

If I were to buy an e-ink reader today, it would certainly be a Kobo Aura HD. It looks simply, awesome and it's priced very competitively: certainly less than the Kindle DXs that some of us bought a couple of years ago.

Amazon has a newer E-ink reader called Kindle Paperwhite
62% more pixels for unsurpassed resolution
25% better contrast for sharp, dark text

BTW, there is an app called Calibre, a cross platform program in which you can convert PDFs into mobi or azw files for kindle reader. It also converts to epub and other formats.

Some PDFs don't convert well and will have stray artifacts and some weird formatting due to some proprietary elements of PDFs but some have converted nicely.

Also converting PDFs to mobi/azw format will allow you to use all the kindle reader's features whereas a PDF format the features will be limited.

Hope this helps.

PS: I hope one day they make a color E-ink reader

I've just bought a Kindle and able to view downloaded html files and PDF files on it. Calibre is great at converting to mobi format. It's definitely at lot better reading and more importantly trying to digest the more technical documents from the device than getting google-eyed staring at a LCD screen!

Thanks for all who replied, much appreciated.

I'm very familiar BTW with e-books and Calibre and other stuff ... I do e-book publishing (consulting) as one of my many pursuits. "We live in interesting publishing times."

You made a solid choice. (So did I.) Enjoy.