I mentioned how excited I was for the Nook here. A large part of the enthusiasm was that, as an academic philosopher, I really want an eReader that has native PDF support. I want to build a huge, awesome eLibrary of philosophy journal articles.
I’m still excited about the Nook, but this enthusiasm has been tempered a bit. First, it won’t support annotating my awesome PDF library. It supports annotation, just not the annotation of any PDFs that you load onto the device.
Now, there is another cause for concern. In my first post on this issue, John Goerzon asked whether I really thought the 6″ screen would be large enough to present the page of a journal article clearly and crisply without the need to zoom or scroll. (NOTE: You don’t want to have to zoom or scroll with an eReader. The screens are too slow.)
When I first played around with a Kindle 2 I thought to myself, surely this screen is big enough to view the full page of a journal article. It just needs native PDF support. But now that a Kindle user raised the issue, I started to worry. I thought I’d try my best to guesstimate what a PDF shrunk to a 6″ diagonal would look like.
Here’s was my crude test. A single page in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research at 100% in my PDF measured at 9 inches on the diagonal on my laptop. Visibility in this case is great. When I reduced that to 75% it measures at just over 6 inches. Visibility is still pretty good. The next setting in my PDF reader was 50%. That takes the diagonal down to well under 6 inches. Visibility is terrible there. So some where between just over 6 inches and well under 6 inches is the point at which visibility becomes an issue. And the nook is going to shrink the PDF to somewhere in between those two.
Conclusion: John is right. We shouldn’t be very confident that PDFs will be that fun to read on the 6″ This has me worried, but I’m not giving up hope just yet. As soon as these things hit the stores, I’m going to see if they’ll let me try it out for myself first hand. I’ll load a PDF on the actual device (if they’ll let me) and I’ll let you know what I find out.
In related news, Plastic Logic finally started giving us more info about their much anticipated eReader. They’re calling it the QUE. This one has been hailed for quite sometime as a genuine competitor to the Kindle DX. If the Nook doesn’t handle PDFs well, and the price is right on the QUE – I may hold out for that. We won’t be able to buy these until at least the first quarter of next year, but I am very confident that PDFs will look awesome on this thing.
Hm. I strongly think we need a centralized hub of philosophical articles. Maybe an online dropbox?
The problem is most philosophers have such wide-ranging interests that keeping and filing the most relevant PDFs for various subjects on these would be a full-time job.
If you have journal articles that are not OCR’d pdf, you can OCR them for free using gmail and then you can load them on a kindle or any other device and they’ll read nicely. I’ve experimented putting non-ocr pdfs on my kindle using hacky methods and it looks awful.
Especially problematic for these screens are scans of pdfs that have columns and/or multiple pages per single paper page.
I think something big like the DX is probably a necessity for academics. Hopefully the QUE is good stuff or Amazon allows for real .pdf support soon.
John – PaperCrop and PDFread are two applications I find helpful for such conversions — see: JSTOR to Amazon Kindle.
Richard,
That looks awesome. Thanks for the heads up.
… The copyright lawyer at my university advises against this as it “has the potential to create significant liability for copyright infringement.” *sigh* Apparently, the systematicity of it all is also what makes it bad.
There are two tools, similar to PaperCrop and PDFRead, that I use to get PDFs the right size for my Sony Reader. (I have a 505, which only a year old, but feels ancient already…)
I’ve tried PaperCrop and PDFRead, but I think these are better.
The first is SoPDF. Read about it here:
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=32066
It has a linux port, which you can find on the second page of the thread.
The second is PDFLRF.
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13135
I tend to use SoPDF for text-based PDFs, and PDFLRF for scanned PDFs. There was a linux version at some point, but it’s been taken down and I can’t find it. The Windows version works under Wine, however. It outputs to the Sony-only format, but you can use the tools from something like calibre to convert to whatever you want.
Calibre:
http://calibre-ebook.com/
(Calibre is great open source ebook software, but its conversion of PDFs is still a little too primitive for technical articles. But it’s great for other things. There’s a new version out every week or two, though, so maybe it’ll improve.)
Oops, forgot to mention that the reason for preferring SoPDF is that unlike PDFRead, PaperCrop and PDFLRF it does not convert the PDF to images, so it preserves the ability to use dictionary and search capabilities, and doesn’t multiply file size the way the others do.
I’m a graduate student and am also looking for the perfect reader to “carry” all my pdf journal articles around. I also wanted to be able to read UMI digital dissertations with an e-ink reader, but couldn’t find a decent solution to making the scanned PDFs UMI carries into reflowable and searchable PDFs.
I got the Sony Reader Touch Edition, and you can annotate pdfs on it. You can also make collections of materials, which I didn’t know the Nook wouldn’t do. That was a great feature.
I returned it, though, in the hopes that the Nook would solve a few problems the Reader had that I thought were dealbreakers:
1. awful software that constantly crashed on my mac
2. glare from the touchscreen
3. not the greatest battery life
Now I’m wondering if I want the Reader back after all. Or maybe the Reader Daily Edition, the Kindle DX competitor?
Why can’t someone just make the perfect product already? I’m sick of all these not-quite-but-almosts.
Jenny,
As for the software, if you’re mainly using it for non-DRM PDFs, and not buying it from the Sony Store, I’d suggest using calibre to transfer titles to/fro the device. The Sony software is indeed terrible.
The battery life issue is disappointing. My PRS-505 has great battery life. I’ve never seen the indicator go below 80% even after using it for days without plugging it in. Then again the Touch Edition has much more features, which might drain it a lot faster than just displaying pages. I don’t know if you were using the MP3 player, but people say that’s a real battery hog. You’d be better served using a separate MP3 device.
I think you’re asking for quite a lot for something that’ll convert scanned PDFs to a reflowable format without significant errors. Even if the perfect Opticcal Character Recognition (OCR) software existed, which it doesn’t (by a wide margin), it still would have to “read the publisher’s mind” about what’s a paragraph, what’s display, what’s a chart vs. what are just spread out words, what’s a header, what’s a footer, and what’s regular text, across whatever layout you could throw at. I think we’re years away from that. This is not to mention that a lot of work went into the layout of those pages: choosing a font, doing widow/orphan control, stack/river control, kerning, ligatures, end-of-line hyphenation… all lost when made to reflow. I prefer just to view the original images, with the margins cut off only.
Most professionally published material uses line lengths of no more than 4.5″ in a column of text. This should be acceptable to read when shrunk (if that’s even necessary) to your screen size, at least in landscape mode.
I am a graduate student also really in need of an easy way to handle the stack of pdf papers I carry around. I have recently received a Nook from Barnes and Nobles, and I am afraid to report that it does a pretty miserable job of handling scientific pdf documents. The graphs look awful, double column documents are too small, and formulas are totally messed up.
I have also tried the Kindle and Kindle DX. I think the DX does the best job so far. My only hope for the Nook is that, being an Android device, Barnes and Nobles will open up development and allow me to fix the current pdf viewer.
Please keep in mind these are all technically 1st generation devices. Yes… even the Kindle DX. They are all using the same screen and eInk technology and none of them have really “improved” processing speed over the different models. Most of this can be blamed on the screen itself and its inability to handle changes quickly.
As always… 1st gen devices will have their issues throughout their entire lineup with very little improvement in performance. My suggestion is to hold out a little while longer if you can. PQI will be releasing their new dual mode LCD/eInk technology soon (in color) and the QUE will be out in Q1 2010: although I see the QUE having the same performance issues as the rest when it comes to PDFs. As for the best PDF eReader… we probably will not see one unless Adobe themselves decide to jump into this ocean only to release a completely native, excessively featured, exclusively PDF reader of their own. Of course knowing Adobe, it will most likely take a few hours to boot up, and load the PDF but once loaded… would be much more enjoyable than your first cup of coffee in the morning. 🙂
I purchased the nook for the sole purpose of reading the ridiculous number of journal articles required of graduate students. Much to my dismay, after uploading the first week’s readings for this term and going to the list of documents (which is organized according to a system understandable probably only by the aliens from the planet which it came from), I encountered some freakish cousin of a PDF reader, with no zoom capability and absolutely no fidelity to whatever original formatting existing in the original document. Try to increase the font size, and you get gigantic words splattered all over the page, decrease one level, and you’ve got the world’s tiniest journal article viewable in full page format. Now I’ve got good eyes, and prefer my laptop at the tiniest resolution possible, but this is a bit much.
So, to answer your title’s question…You would think so…But you would be SO, So, SO, SO, SO, SO WRONG. To put it crassly, IT FUCKING SUCKS.
I have a huge PDF collection that I’ve been experimenting with on my new Nook. Overall it works great, but the downside is that you won’t get close to the 1500 book capacity of the built in memory. Also, there are some issues that I haven’t been able to pin down. Some of the files had extremely long names, so I shortened them and found that didn’t help. I thought it might have something to do with file size, but experimentation has shown me that it’s not a problem with large PDF’s. My next guess about how to handle it is to look at the file properties for anything odd OR run it through some software to clean it up a bit. For me, the advantages of having my books handy wherever I go far outweighs the little bugs.
I’m with you Matt. The benefits outweigh the bugs in my book. I don’t have the problems with PDFs that Fernanda seems to have. The smallest setting is legible to me. It’s a bit too small for my liking, but that’s a problem with the way the PDFs are typeset (with all the extra white space).
I suspect that we’ll start to see more optimized PDFs in the future.
When the small font gets annoying, I can resize the PDFs. Fernanda is right that in some cases you get weird breaks, but I suggest trying different sizes. For me, the weird breaks only come in on one of the zoom settings. At other settings, the PDF reads great with cleaner breaks.
And again, as Matt says, some of the less than ideal features seem to outweigh some of these less than ideal factors.
If you’re interested, I posted instructions for batch cropping (removing whitespace margins) PDFs (a directory’s worth at a time, though it would be easy to tweak it to recursively do subfolders) using ghostscript and calibre for both linux and windows here:
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=790518
(See post #9 and post #10 for linux and windows respectively; the earlier posts I was helping someone with a more specific issue. The linux instructions might also work on a mac; not sure, never tested it.)
You can actually do this faster with sopdf, though if I recall correctly, you lose more metadata properties that way.
I tried PDF files on the Nook and was sorely disappointed. I don’t think I should have to spend so much time formatting my files to make them kind of look ok. And that was after I spent a great deal of time moving the files to the Nook. While some pages were fine, some were so small the were impossible to read. After much thought, I switched to the Kindle and haven’t had one problem with my PDF files at all. My Nook and I will be parting soon and I’m hoping to find it a nice new home. I do believe that the Nook WILL get better. It is first generation and as one employee at BN commented to me, it is a work in progress. But I needed to have it meet my needs now, and I didn’t realize I was purchasing a work in progress. I thought the majority of the bugs would be worked out prior to the release. Reminds me of Microsoft releasing Beta versions of Windows because they were so anxious to meet the demand (not to mention greedy).
All of you might also note that the free application called “BeCyPDFMetaEdit” can edit the metadata on a PDF that will allow you to edit almost all the metadata associated with the PDF. A good all around free utility for PDFs. You can Google it and download from your favorite site.
Here is my experience (and some solutions) with reading mathematical papers on the Nook:
http://arminstraub.com/mathematics/reading-mathematical-papers-on-the-nook
Not sure though what equivalents of latex and arxiv other academic fields have…
Has anyone solved the e-reader/tablet for academia dilemma? If so, please let me know! This is one grad student that is fed up with lugging books, journals, laptop and of course the ever so necessary cup of coffee, in and out of classrooms and the library ….
Any insight you can give me would be ever so helpful in my quest to organize and simplify this chaotic world of academia 🙂
Solved? Probably not. I collected together the best tips I know for making academic PDFs readable on such devices in a blog post on PhilTeX:
http://www.charlietanksley.net/philtex/reading-pdfs-on-portables/
I have one of the earliest devices, a 6″ Sony PRS-505. There are some newer ones with significant larger screens like the Sony 900, iReX Digital Reader, Kindle DX, but they’re more money. But if it’s really important to you, I’d look into those.
Hi,
I have another question. Does the Nook support landscape reading mode? It might help for PDF reading if zooming into the PDF is possible and if the page turn gets to the next section of the page, isn’t it? Some eReaders like the PocketBooks seem to do this kind of zoom work on PDFs…