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Comment by AndreiVajnaII | Hacker News Reader

The Kindle Touch's killer feature would be better PDF support. The Nook Touch looks totally unusable for PDFs.

The Nook STP runs Android, and it's pretty trivial to get Android-native PDF readers up-and-running on it. None are yet optimized for the e-ink screen, of course, but some have an option to turn off animation which helps somewhat.

Something like mupdf (which has already been ported) combined with some button/touch bindings and perhaps a touch-friendly zoom feature seems to me like it would do the job perfectly... and be an easy weekend hack for much of this site's target audience?*

I think you'd have to look long and hard for an e-ink reader with truly decent out-of-box PDF support and no serious failings in other areas — my search so far has been unfruitful, but please do tell if you've come across anything which fits the bill.

*edit: If someone actually does/has done this/something similar, please post about it here!

Actually the ectaco jetbook, a cheap ebook reader I got over a year ago as superb PDF support. It automatically zooms in past margins, loads all graphics and text, turns pages quickly, even on monster sized textbook PDF files. This cheap piece of hardware handles PDFs better than my (albeit cheap) android tablet. If only they had a version with a decent screen size, it would be the killer device for textbook reading.

Thanks for the tip, but the jetBook seems to use a TFT screen: "jetBook uses a huge, state-of-the-art 5-inch VGA reflective monochrome TFT screen" (http://www.jetbook.net/specifications). No word about resolution but I'm skeptical that it could compare in any way to e-ink, especially the new Pearl panels.

Oh definitely not. But its not bad in its own right. It's not backlit, it uses ambient light to display the picture. So battery life is quite good. Personally I found it easy on the eyes, but then again I don't particularly have trouble with backlight LCD's for extended periods of time either.

The resolution of my 5'' is 640x480. The size definitely kills it for anything other than standard novels. If they came out with an 8inch version I would be all over it.

Yes, I did see videos of rooted nook, and you could use android apps to view PDFs, but the problem with that is, of course, rooting the device.

I think Kindle 3 is better for PDFs than the Nook Touch, because you can zoom in. It is clunky, but at least you can do it. On the Nook you can only change font sizes, and that reflows the PDF and messes everything up.

The solution, as I see it, since they have a touch screen is to implement something similar to ezPDF, which is my favourite PDF reader for Android. Just a double tap on a section, and it'll zoom exactly on the section of text you want to read. You don't have to fiddle with fixed zoom settings and clunky movement to try and fit the viewport to include the portion you want to see.

Of course, they probably aren't interested in doing this at all, since they'd be very happy if you only read books bought at their store.

PS. The Kindle DX is probably the best for PDFs, but its price and size are big downpoints.

It seems to me that PDF is not a format suitable for much more than printing on paper.

A very important feature of Kindle is to allow choosing font size. It make it an ideal tool for elders. But PDF documents have a fixed layout that won't allow resizing font conveniently, or you have to break it in pieces.

I understand PDFs aren't a great format for books, but there are some cases in which it'd be fantastic to have them on an e-reader.

For graphical content, such as technical drawings/illustrations, wireframes or just B&W document proofs, the resolution and fidelity of an E-Ink Pearl screen combined with the true WYSIWYG nature of the PDF format across digital/print would be a dream come true for me...

You are right. But, I have an extensive library of PDF files that I'd like to read. I expect many people do too. Most are technical documents with equations, graphs and other images. I would love to have an e-ink based reader that will render such documents correctly.

But, Amazon are probably more interested in selling their content, so I understand the lack of PDF support.

I have an older Kindle DX which can do technical PDFs. Aside from the cost (nowadays triple the smaller Kindle), it's still not entirely satisfactory for three reasons:

- It's cumbersome to do anything other than reading sequentially.

- The screen is still not big enough for letter/A4 pages - it does perform decent scaling, but you know how scrunched many technical papers are. Can go landscape and read half a page, which is a pain in two column layouts ...

- It's a tad heavy, almost like a hardcover textbook that needs to be held in both hands.

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