I have been reading quite a lot of PDF eBooks of late at work, such as Implementing CIFS. As I don’t like reading on a bright computer monitor for long periods, purchasing a Kindle seemed like a good idea due to the high contrast, non-backlit E-Ink display. Having loads of free classics books available to download was an added bonus.
“…displayed like an image, and not text”
PDFs on Kindle almost work, but are a bit of a pain. Unlike regular Kindle formatted books, they are displayed like an image, and not text. The major difference is that you cannot resize the text of a PDF, instead you have to “zoom in”, as if the PDF was an image. This is a bit annoying, because you cannot make the text to a big enough size to read on one page without rotating it – so you end up using the Kindle in landscape, rather than portrait mode. This is not as comfortable as the page turning buttons are now on the top and bottom of the device. Still, the PDF formatting is perfect, e.g. images and tables look fine.*
On the plus side
- The online store is better than I imagined for finding books, even free ones. They literally download in seconds, which is very satisfying, but a little disconcerting as you could easily flutter away all of your money very quickly.
- Minesweeper can be played by pressing ALT+SHIFT+M from the Home screen. Press G to play GoMoKu (4 in a row).
- I’m currently experimenting with Instapaper, which sends long articles from the internet to your Kindle, so they’re easier to read.
What’s Missing?
* As an experiment, I e-mailed the CIFS book to my amazon kindle email which automatically converts it to Kindle formatting. The theory being that I can then resize the text and read it the normal way around. Unfortunately it loses the formatting of the columns and images, so it seems the “rotation method” is the best solution at the time of writing.
grepmonster 