Google Books PDF Smackdown: NookColor Vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab Vs. iPad

This article isn't really a comparison between the Nook, Galaxy Tab and the iPad, it's more a comparison of a specific ebook application on each of those platforms. It's not comprehensive (Aldiko for Android isn't mentioned for example).

If this were a hardware review like the title says, it would discuss which devices are more suited to reading ebooks: is the Galaxy Tab's smaller size better? Is the Nook's screen more comfortable to read on? Is the iPad too heavy? etc.

Looks like none of these things seem to support JPEG2000, which is how Google Books encodes images larger than some threshold x. There are a couple apps that add it in, but most PDF readers rely on built-in stuff in iOS or Android.

I read PDFs off Google Books all the time in GoodReader, it’s quick and works well. If you need the images, as I do, you can resave the PDF using Preview if you’re on a Mac, it’ll get like 8 times bigger but the images will show.

Mike, you might try using GoodReader on the iPad to view the PDF. It uses a different PDF rendering engine than iBooks. I believe it is a bit better with larger PDFs, but really with PDFs like the Google PDFs which are basically a collection of image files in a PDF container, it's going to bog down a lot of computers, handheld or not.

tl;dr: "But for now, anyone who wants a tablet device to read Google Books PDFs, there is clearly only one choice: the iPad."

Slightly offtopic, but I was unable to download PDF of the book in question, which the article uses to compare e-readers. It only showed up 38 pages out of 533 available.

The book is Success: A Novel by Samuel Hopkins Adams http://books.google.com/books?id=Slc1AAAAMAAJ

EDIT: Using Advanced Search I was able to find a copy that I can read fully online at Google Books, but I still do not see any option to download the book.

Perhaps, this is because I am not really familiar with Google Books. Perhaps it is because I am in Europe?

Copyright is 1921, so the restriction must come from the library not the author, one presumes.

Could these PDFs be using external images? That would explain the long delays to load images (because they're being downloaded) and the variable PDF reader support.

Here's a StackOverflow post about external images in PDFs: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1833222/adding-external-i...

I smell a business opportunity, but it seems pretty hopeless since nothing can be done outside of Google about the quality of the OCR scans. I don't want to download the PDF, I want to read a nicely formatted book on the Web.

It's stuff like this that makes me lean towards getting a windows 7 or possibly linux tablet instead of one of the newer 'mobile' OSs.

Was this review about the different devices, adobes pdf or googles OCR?

Reading pdf books on any device is something that could do with improvement. Most of the time I just give up and download the text version.

For the next review download android adobe reader app or goodreader for iPad and let us know how it goes.