The Random Ebooks Questions Post

[elf]

Ask your questions! Get answers! Maybe even useful answers!

Ask anything! Ask about ereaders, or filetypes, or conversion methods, or where to find books, or which authors don't like ebooks, or what software works on which computers, or anything else ebook-related. Preferably, put the question, or part of it, in the subject line. That way, the questions will be easy to find, and new readers who show up can see if their question has been asked before.

Feel free to post links to your journal where you've spelled out your questions in detail (or just make a new post here; it's totally fine to make a long post about "thinking about ebook readers; what's the pros & cons of these two?")

Answer questions! If you know about a certain aspect of ebookery, jump in with answers!

Comments

[yhlee]

Are the options for reading PDFs still dismal on current ereaders? My iRex DR800, which I loved because I could read full-sized PDFs (either by changing font size or using selection zoom) and epubs, and which was pretty much perfect, appears to have died, and at this point looking for another one is probably not such a hot idea. I could do without the epubs if only I could read PDFs. I read them on my laptop sometimes, but the experience is not very good.

[elf]

Short answer: yes, dismal.

Longer answer: Kindle DX does okay for reading, because the screen is bigger, but has no search, highlight or bookmark options for PDFs.

The Jinke line (Hanlin, Astak EZReaders) have decent reflow & font options (8 sizes) for PDFs that can reflow, but those are hard to find in the US. They have no zoom, just reflow-and-embiggen-text, and no annotation support. (At least, mine doesn't have annotation support; I can't really speak for all of them.)

I think most (all?) of the others currently in production either do zoom or reflow but not both.

The new Sony T1 may have the best PDF support on the market right now. The Sony discussion forum at mobileread is a good place to look for specifics.

[yhlee]

Thank you so much! You are awesome. I hadn't heard of the T1, will investigate.

Sadly, some of my 100% perfectly legal PDFs appear to be no-OCR straight-ahead scans (I have some military manuals like this), so that probably decides it for me.

[elf]

FWIW, I'm often willing to do the OCR to convert scans to text-readable ebooks. (I like converting military manuals, especially the ones that the gov't hasn't seen fit to release in useful digital formats.) I'm always willing to at least throw them through the auto-OCR program, which gets decent results if they're good-quality scans (300dpi or higher); as time permits, am willing to do more conversion work.