I will pay for a quick good conversion: PDF to Kindle, Buffett's Letters

[Robz26]

I have a PDF of Warren Buffett's letters from 1957 onward. I would like to convert this to .MOBI or .AZW for my Kindle.

I can do a decent job myself, but I imagine an expert here can spend 5 minutes on it and and do an amazing job.

It's a 1051 page PDF file (~5 MB). The text is all digital and most margins and formatting are consistent.

Things that were hard for me:
- proper line/paragraph breaking
- maintaining the tables
- creating a table of contents with "1957 Letter", "1958 Letter" -- etc -- (they are mostly labeled as such, so a proper XPath expression should grab them)

Would any investor-friend be willing to do this gratis? Otherwise, how much would you like to be paid for the job, and can it be done by tomorrow PM EST? I leave for a long trip and have a lot of reading to catch up on.

Best,
Robert Cecot

[HarryT]

PDFs rarely convert well to other formats without a lot of hand editing after conversion. This is almost certainly NOT a "5 minute job" .

[BetterRed]

ditto what HarryT said

What model Kindle is it.

A quick search suggests everything except the Kindle 1 and the early Touch can read PDF native. And with the Touch the s/w can be updated (for free) to a later version which provides PDF support.

BR

[HarryT]

The Kindle Touch has always supported PDF. What you may perhaps be thinking of is that the original Touch firmware didn't support landscape mode, which can make reading PDFs easier.

But few PDFs formatted for large page sizes can be read well on a 6" screen; PDF was never intended to be an ebook format.

[Robz26]

Well how about close enough? Also, I'm more than willing to pay more $$$ if the job is tough. Anyone want to at least see the PDF and try?

[bradbolt]

delete

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Robz26

Well how about close enough? Also, I'm more than willing to pay more $$$ if the job is tough. Anyone want to at least see the PDF and try?

Robz, forgive me for saying so, but you're beating a dead horse here. I would hazard a guess that you're probably looking at 10-20h work for the job you're asking for. For a reasonably skilled person, you should expect to pay $50 per hour. Are you really willing to spend $500-$1000 for the job?

Perhaps a better choice would just be to go out and buy a proper ebook version of Mr Buffer's letters? Doesn't wherever you bought this PDF from offer the book in ePub or Mobi formats?

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Robz, forgive me for saying so, but you're beating a dead horse here. I would hazard a guess that you're probably looking at 10-20h work for the job you're asking for. For a reasonably skilled person, you should expect to pay $50 per hour. Are you really willing to spend $500-$1000 for the job?

Perhaps a better choice would just be to go out and buy a proper ebook version of Mr Buffer's letters? Doesn't wherever you bought this PDF from offer the book in ePub or Mobi formats?

If Robz is referring to the Letter to Shareholders that Berkshire Hathaway publish annually - then the letters between 1977 & 2011 are in the public domain http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html. Before that there were Letters to Partners, these are also in the public domain - the early ones are scanned paper image PDF's.

Maybe someone has gathered them all up onto a single PDF, but I can't find it, so it must have been published privately.

Rather than incurring a $1000 expense for the conversion, I suggest Rob invest in something suitable for reading the PDF, such as $539 64GB Ipad Mini. But first check if the PDF is reflowable - most are these days.

BR

[JSWolf]

There is no quick conversion from PDF if you want to do it right?

[Agama]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Robz, forgive me for saying so, but you're beating a dead horse here.

+1