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Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

I have to read plenty of PDFs (imagine recent research articles) and have many books in PDF format I bought (a single photography/visual art book PDF can be easily 100MB) - if Amazon had incorporated a silly microSD card slot, I could stuff everything I got into it. Now my Voyage is relegated to "hot items" only, the ones I need to read right now, and often I don't bother. Now what is the cost of a microSD slot? $0.20? They insist on some silly business model and they just ruin it for the resourceful clients that don't want to waste time switching between multiple devices, could buy a lot from them and inspire other people to "ape" after them as well. Now I rather stuff a 200GB microSD card into my Android phone (iPhone has the same issue), put everything there instead and buy ebooks elsewhere. Win for Amazon?

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How can you even read PDFs on it? Whenever I try it tries to cram it from a 8.5x11 down to he 6in screen and everything turns out blurry. Images also don't seem to be fantastic on the devices, so I don't know how many high-image documents you could even use on that device.

Voyage has 300ppi as well, so it's readable from close distances (kinda like low-quality laser print); research articles often have two columns per A4 so I just zoom in 200% and am more-less fine. I would rather have 8"+ 4:3 of course. And sometimes PDF rendering is extremely slow as well, but...

On the other hand if I need a certain photography setup for achieving a certain look, I can use Voyage for that - imagine instead of a PDF book with lighting setups and examples of results you had a piece of paper with a drawing - seems pretty comparable quality-wise.

For research articles I do this:

1. crop out page numbers: http://briss.sourceforge.net/

2. remove columns and reflow with: http://willus.com/k2pdfopt/

The later one works like magic, it totally made my ebook reader so much useful. (A Tolino Vision, a very fine german device not locked to the Amazon store: http://mytolino.com/)

(edit: fixed links)

What do you mean by not locked to the Amazon store? Does the Tolino work with books bought from Amazon? How about Google, B&N, or Apple?

It means you can copy Epub files to it without conversion (with or without drm). It has direct integration with various ebook shops (mostly German) as opposed to be tied to the reader manufacturer's bookshop. It's not the panacea but it seems better than the situation with most other readers. I also enjoy the tap-to-flip feature (tap with your finger on the back to flip page), specially when lying on the bed.

The lack of a microsd slot and tiny internal storage is also the reason why I have never bought a Kindle, including the DX. I also have a lot of books that were converted to PDF and I typically need about 20GB free storage so far to keep my collection.

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