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Obligatory Introduction Post
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efw. Really.)
I've been actively reading ebooks on mobile devices for over three years now. I started on a Clié, which I loved and would still be using if all three of the ones I owned hadn't died. Sony no longer supports it--hadn't supported it for a few years when I first got one--and I collected, and killed, three of them before I gave up on the device. (One dead screen, two with unfixable battery issues.) I wanted to upgrade to a new, better PDA but couldn't wade through the sales hype to figure out which of the eleventy-frak available versions were good ebook readers. They all held the software, but not all were physically designed for easy ebook use--or more importantly, weren't designed for easy ebook use by me.
And I'd been looking more and more at that "e-Ink" stuff, and whined at my husband about my dead Cliés until he bought me a Sony PRS-505. (He said "$300 limit; get whichever one you like." I went crazy reading review sites for a couple of days, and settled on the one that seemed to work best for me.) The PRS wasn't my first choice; the Hanlin was--but I couldn't find out if that was supported in the States at all, and it seemed to be risky for that reason. And it was a very very close choice.
I knew I didn't want a Kindle, because I didn't want to be tied to Amazon for doc conversion; I don't want to email my content to someone else in order to read it. Also, I never quite clicked with the .mobi format; I was fond of ereader. Couldn't afford an iRex, so its features were irrelevant. And I picked the 505 over the 700 for battery life & screen clarity. I've had it for almost six months, and I love it. I take it everywhere, and I read on it constantly. I ignore the Sony store, use Calibre for doc conversion (when I don't use Word to make weird-sized PDFs), and maybe someday I'll figure out that hack that makes the book titles all the same point size in the menus.
efw. Really.) I've been actively reading ebooks on mobile devices for over three years now. I started on a Clié, which I loved and would still be using if all three of the ones I owned hadn't died. Sony no longer supports it--hadn't supported it for a few years when I first got one--and I collected, and killed, three of them before I gave up on the device. (One dead screen, two with unfixable battery issues.) I wanted to upgrade to a new, better PDA but couldn't wade through the sales hype to figure out which of the eleventy-frak available versions were good ebook readers. They all held the software, but not all were physically designed for easy ebook use--or more importantly, weren't designed for easy ebook use by me.
And I'd been looking more and more at that "e-Ink" stuff, and whined at my husband about my dead Cliés until he bought me a Sony PRS-505. (He said "$300 limit; get whichever one you like." I went crazy reading review sites for a couple of days, and settled on the one that seemed to work best for me.) The PRS wasn't my first choice; the Hanlin was--but I couldn't find out if that was supported in the States at all, and it seemed to be risky for that reason. And it was a very very close choice.
I knew I didn't want a Kindle, because I didn't want to be tied to Amazon for doc conversion; I don't want to email my content to someone else in order to read it. Also, I never quite clicked with the .mobi format; I was fond of ereader. Couldn't afford an iRex, so its features were irrelevant. And I picked the 505 over the 700 for battery life & screen clarity. I've had it for almost six months, and I love it. I take it everywhere, and I read on it constantly. I ignore the Sony store, use Calibre for doc conversion (when I don't use Word to make weird-sized PDFs), and maybe someday I'll figure out that hack that makes the book titles all the same point size in the menus.
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Letter-sized PDFs on the e-ink readers are awful. Even the ones that reflow the text have problems; PDFs only reflow well if they were made well in the first place, and a lot of them weren't. Publisher's free promo PDFs are some of the worst. Screwy fonts, oversize pages with crop marks, typographic layout that puts a space between every letter that you can't see in the PDF, but is there if you copy the text into anything else. And there's often no metadata, or utterly useless metadata where the document is called "1135121.x34.cdvs" because that's how their auto-convert program tags it.
But I do get tired of "pdfs are not an ebook format!!!" Because they are. And they're a lot better than, say, TealDoc... it's just that people don't run across hundreds of TealDocs that they want to convert to something else.
I suspect that a lot of the PDF-hate could go away if copyright worries didn't border on psychosis; it'd be easy enough to say "throw a dozen PDFs at me & I'll add the metadata & bookmark them for easy reading"--except that that involves "copies" which are, at best, problematic.
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But yeah, overall... PDF was designed as a print-ready format; doing anything but print with it is less-than-optimal use.
Feedbooks.com has free ebooks, and PDF is one of their formats--but they let you set the page size if you want.