I’m seriously looking into getting an e-Reader. I have one crucial requirement (actually the only requirement, since I doubt I’ll read much else on it): it needs to be able to read PDF natively. More than that, I’m not talking about text PDF, but about images, specifically, text-images from very old books. As a result, I’m chiefly interested in finding out which of the current bunch of e-Readers will most suit my needs.
Sony’s PRS-600? iRiver’s Story? Amazon’s Kindle? Any others?
I’m hoping someone has experience with PDF reading of the sort I’m looking at.
This is pretty much why I bought the Kindle DX - to read PDF documentation (tech manuals, mostly). It’s pretty good at it, except for sizing and cropping issues: it will trim margins to give you more useful space, but not if there’s ANYTHING in that margin: page number, header, loose pixel from a scanned document, whatever. If it gets it wrong, there’s nothing you can do about it - there’s no manual cropping controls.
That said, you can always get an 8.5 x 11 “actual size” document a half-page at a time by rotating it, so I haven’t found any documents that are actually unreadable. I do wish you could give it “example” crops that take out headers/page numbers/footers and have it apply to every page of a document, though.
Oh, and the non-DX Kindles support PDF only as a converted format; the DX is the only one with native PDF support.
As far as the Kindle goes, I think its like this: the original Kindle will not natively read PDFs, nor could the Kindle 2 at first, except “experimentally.” The DX can read them natively, and an update to the Kindle 2 that was pushed last week added native PDF capability there as well. I have the Kindle 2 and got the update, but haven’t tried to load any PDFs yet.
I really want an e-reader as well, showed 'em to my wife. But, I think I’m gonna wait until my birthday in July. I hear talk of color screens and other fancy shmancy add-ons coming.
That’s not true. I’ve got the standard Kindle and it reads pdfs directly just fine. The text is tiny on a non rotated normal sized pdf but not so small that I find it difficult to read. I wouldn’t recommend it(for pdf usage at least) for anyone that’s far sighted or else wise has close up vision issues.
I only just got it a few days ago though. So I’ve tried few pdfs with it but no issues so far.
I’ve not personally seen a Sony reader but I’ve been told it has poor pdf support.
The only other ebook reader I have experience with is the jetBook. And I wouldn’t recommend it for pdf usage. It seems to have difficulty properly sizing images and putting the images where they are supposed to go in the formatting. Though it’s been getting better bit by bit with firmware updates since I got it.
Thanks for all the replies! I missed telling you I wasn’t in the States…the Nook sounds very very good, and I may have to wait until I’m in the States next time to get that, if there reviews continue as good as they have been.
