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Comment by joeyo | Hacker News Reader

I'm watching this space very, very closely (i.e. tablets specifically for reading PDFs of articles). There are a lot of options but none are quite perfect:

  * iPad
    Pros:
    - Color screen
    - Can zoom to exact size desired
    - Multi-touch
    - Papers.app (easy sync/organization for PDFs)
    Cons: 
    - Not e-ink
    - Battery life
    - Not as light/thin as Kindle

  * Kindle 3
    Pros:
    - E-ink
    - Amazing battery life
    Cons: 
    - Zoom is limited to a couple sizes
    - No touch screen
    - No expansion card & limited to ~3GB internal
    - No real way to organize large number of PDFs

  * Kindle DX
    Pros: 
    - Larger screen means PDFs are sized just about right without zoom
    - Same pros as K3
    Cons: 
    - Larger screen means it's a bit too awkward to hold with one hand
    - A bit on the heavy side
    - Same cons as K3

In my opinion the perfect PDF reader tablet would have a (color) e-ink display with multi-touch for scrolling and an arbitrary zoom. Kindle 4 maybe?

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I'm not sure e-ink is an asset in a PDF reader. I use my iPad for a lot of technical papers and books. It's much faster than an e-ink display would be, and the page turning lag is still annoying. E-ink would be insufferable.

My Kindle 3 turns PDF pages about as fast as I could turn a page in a book or a stapled article printout. Not lightning fast, but good enough for me.

Still you have to wait for the page to render. When you are turning a page in a book or a printout you are doing something that requires some kind of activity from your part, but when you have clicked the button you are just waiting for things to happen.

I don't mean to say that this is a big problem, and I haven't been using E-ink readers that much. But when it comes to digital reading, I appreciate the snappiness of scrolling fast through pages and also the "jump to" functions, whether it's via links or "go to page" actions.

I have a k1, k2, k3 and iPad. In fact, I brought the k2 and k3 and iPad on a vacation with me to Kauai. Don't try and read complex PDFs on a kindle. I have several dozen downloaded onto my iPad (dropbox+goodreader make this trivial) - the kindle is not the right tool for flipping through PDFs. I have logged about 40 hours reading on the kindles in five days - (mostly on the beach, a little at coffeeshops) - but linear text reading (novels) is really their strong suit. I don't think I've ever run into anybody that tried to use them for technical/reference/diagrams and was happy with the results. Too slow, no easy way to hop around in the doc.

The iPad, on the other hand, is almost perfect for this. The screen needs to be higher resolution, easier to read in sun (though a matte screen protector helps a lot) and I'll be perfectly content.

As it is, I have not printed a single 8 1/2x11" printout in six+ months - the iPad has let me go almost 100% paperless. (11x17 printouts of network diagrams still useful in meetings)

Couldn't agree more. I love my Kindle for reading long-form (novels, non-fiction). But I read a lot of medical journals and while you can read them on the Kindle, it is sub-optimal at best. Plus I'm a pathologist and most of my journals have pretty pictures where color is nice to have. I'm currently using a rooted Nookcolor (which is okay), but I'm a recent Mac convert, so I'm looking to pick up an ipad on the refresh.

What's the consensus on the best PDF reader for iPad? Is goodreader 'it'?

Yes, it is really all you need. Recent updates have enabled annotation and other nice features and it was one of the first apps to jump on the dropbox bandwagon so it is easy to keep papers in sync on the device and across platforms.

Battery life is not an issue with my iPad. When using it for only reading (i.e. not streaming video), it can easily go for a week without charging. Even with video, on a full charge, it can easily play 8 hours without recharging.

A major selling point for me is not only organising papers but the ability to annotate papers with full text search for your notes - something available with the mendeley app on the iPad. If no other reader includes this ability soon I know a lot of academics planning on getting an iPad v1 once v2 is launched.

Check Adam from Notion Ink. Next pre-order round starts soon, next week I think (note: I haven't received mine yet, from the first pre-order. Others have, though).

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