What is your advice about e-book readers if the intended use is reading .pdf files, either found on the web or created from software using one of those “print to pdf” options? The content I am most interested in is technical, often with tables or graphs or drawings, occasionally with photographs (but I don’t think image rendering quality is too important and don’t care about color).
I don’t anticipate buying e-books much. I don’t picture reading a novel from beginning to end. However, jumping from document to document, or jumping around inside a document, might be important.
I don’t have one of these readers but am thinking of getting one. The e-ink displays I have seen all appear well suited for the content I like.
I have the experience of only one e-reader to go on - the amazon kindle, but I think it suits reading pdf files quite well. I have a couple of PDFs on mine (programming manuals) The image quality is excellent, but you’ll have to put up with the images being grayscale. (I assume that is the case with all e-readers though)
Honestly my Kindle 3 doesn’t work well with pdf files. Unless I convert them to another format, the page turns are slow, and sometimes not everything fits on the screen.
I say grayscale because it differentiates it from pure ‘black and white’ which would imply that there are just two shades (black and white).
In other words, the pictures are almost as good as a black and white photo.
Mine’s fairly new. it works fine with pdfs. Maybe yours is an older model. I f napier were to get a kindle he’d have the option of getting the newest model.
So I guess the kindle 3 is the latest model. My mistake. It worked ok for the couple of PDFs I have. I admit I haven’t spent a huge amount of time reading them though. I just put them on and ‘tested’ them. (scrolling through pages, zooming in, zooming out etc…)
I have a Kindle DX, the large screen model, for reading pdfs. It is much better for my eyes than reading them on a computer monitor. However it is not ideal. There is no easy way to flick through pages, you have to turn each page. It also strips the chapter headings and such, so you can’t locate the start of a chapter easily. For a file I am working with, I add bookmarks on pages I need to go to a lot, but that involves going to the bookmark menu, and picking the right one. They are much easier to navigate on computer. The clarity is fine though. Diagrams and such are easy to read. Some of my pdfs are actually image scans of a document, rather than a pdf text file, and these are a pain, because the text is tiny and you have to zoom in, rather than resize the text. Zooming in, the clarity is, again, fine, but the navigation is horrible.
I have a Kindle DX and an iPad. For fiction and the like (front-to-back stuff), the DX is a nicer reading experience.
For technical, reference, and PDFs, the iPad is the hands-down winner. On these small screens, many technical PDFs pages need to be shown in parts/half-pages to allow decent reading. This is pain incarnate on the slow-to-render, slow to change DX (especially for text in columns, where you have to keep switching back and forth between half-pages), but smooth and effortless on the iPad – you can zoom in and out instantly, the pages render quickly regardless of content, and you do get color (although the OP indicated this wasn’t overly important). And if you need to search, you can do it, whereas it’s very, very clumsy on the DX keypad.
Yeah I would avoid getting a Kindle if it’s purely for PDF reading. It doesn’t recognise native PDF bookmarks so if you have a document with bookmarks you need to bookmark it all from within Kindle and then you only get page numbers, you can’t name each bookmark. I do use my Kindle DX to read certain PDFs but to be honest my iPhone is a better PDF reader.
I have a Sony PRS-600 that, like Fish Cheer I bought primarily for reading PDFs. I quickly found out that it works, although very poorly. Navigation was horrible and very little was rendered correctly, even plain text PDFs had paragraph breaks in the wrong places. It is more or less worthless as a PDF reader.
However.
I have found software that can convert PDF into Epub - which is the open source format for ebooks. Once PDFs are converted they are much easier to navigate and actually render correctly.
The Kindle does not support epub. Get a Sony Reader and PDF to epub converter software if you want any chance of success.
I have not found freeware epub to PDF conversion software.
In my OP I didn’t mention iPhones but it happens I am thinking of getting one of them. I switched to the Mac last spring, and bought our current phones in fall '09, and if I had had the Mac first I think I would have done iPhones.
So, how doable is it to read PDFs that might have a graph or sketch or two using an iPhone?
I think it would be a huge advantage of the iPhone that I would always have it on me, so I could make use of unplanned idle time (e.g. waiting rooms).
It’s not bad. You need to download a PDF reader app and some are better than others. I use Goodreader. The main limitation is the size of the screen. You can pinch the screen with your fingers to zoom in and out to get a better look at things and Goodreader has full bookmark support which makes reading reference material a lot easier. I wouldn’t buy an iPhone just so you can have a PDF reader but if you’re going to get an iPhone anyway you might hold off on getting a PDF reader until you try PDFs on the phone.
A big advantage for the Kindle is that it has a long battery life, up to about two weeks with the wireless turned off and around a week with it on. The iPhone on and iPad would need to be charged nearly every night, but for many people that’s not an issue.