MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Convince Me to Cancel Nook Pre-Order

tautologico · 11-03-2009, 11:12 AM

I'm not particularly worried about convincing you to buy or not buy anything

But I did some research on the nook, because initially I thought it to be really better than the kindle, and now I believe it's not much better, maybe a little, maybe it's on the same league.

PDF support was one of the issues, I read a lot of academic papers on PDF and other technical material, and thought the PDF support on the nook was a significant advantage. It turns out that it is not easy to render complex PDF files in the small screen when they were designed for a larger paper size. Some people say that the PDF implementation used by the nook is not satisfactory for files with complex layouts (like two columns, something widely used in papers). If your PDFs are mostly text I suppose you'll be able to read them well. There is some discussion about this in this thread.

As for PDF workarounds, mostly text PDFs are easily converted either by the service provided by Amazon, or by using Mobipocket Creator (free download). I converted some mostly-text PDFs and read them on the Kindle without problem, and the conversion process is very easy. For complex layouts, with figures and tables, neither of these two solutions work well. I used a tool called PaperCrop (latest versions here) to convert complex PDFs to images and loaded them into the pictures folder of the kindle, and it worked well. It's possible that this solution will be the better choice for complex PDFs on the nook too, unless their PDF implementation is better than expected. Using PaperCrop is easy but still is a little more involved than a simple conversion.

About epub support, I don't know. It doesn't matter to me, so I didn't look into it. If it is important to you, maybe the nook is a better choice. I don't believe Amazon will include epub support in this generation of Kindles, mostly because distributing software updates via wireless is really expensive to them.

For clipping material I suppose you could paste the clippings in a file (word document, html or plain text) and convert it using Mobipocket Creator easily. Never tried to do it, so I don't know how well it would work for you. No idea how you would do this with the nook, but there's probably some similar way.

Bottomline, for me, is that if you're mostly worried about PDFs, there's not a big difference between kindle and nook. The kindle is less convenient, because you have to go through an extra conversion step for simple PDFs. For complex PDFs they seem to be on the same boat and the better choice is using some specialized tool. But we don't know, the nook is not out yet, and it may have a wonderful PDF implementation, who knows? I wouldn't count on that though (it's the Adobe implementation used by other readers, so people have previous experience with it).

11-03-2009, 11:12 AM	#2
tautologico Member Posts: 22 Karma: 50 Join Date: Oct 2009 Device: Kindle 2 International	I'm not particularly worried about convincing you to buy or not buy anything But I did some research on the nook, because initially I thought it to be really better than the kindle, and now I believe it's not much better, maybe a little, maybe it's on the same league. PDF support was one of the issues, I read a lot of academic papers on PDF and other technical material, and thought the PDF support on the nook was a significant advantage. It turns out that it is not easy to render complex PDF files in the small screen when they were designed for a larger paper size. Some people say that the PDF implementation used by the nook is not satisfactory for files with complex layouts (like two columns, something widely used in papers). If your PDFs are mostly text I suppose you'll be able to read them well. There is some discussion about this in this thread. As for PDF workarounds, mostly text PDFs are easily converted either by the service provided by Amazon, or by using Mobipocket Creator (free download). I converted some mostly-text PDFs and read them on the Kindle without problem, and the conversion process is very easy. For complex layouts, with figures and tables, neither of these two solutions work well. I used a tool called PaperCrop (latest versions here) to convert complex PDFs to images and loaded them into the pictures folder of the kindle, and it worked well. It's possible that this solution will be the better choice for complex PDFs on the nook too, unless their PDF implementation is better than expected. Using PaperCrop is easy but still is a little more involved than a simple conversion. About epub support, I don't know. It doesn't matter to me, so I didn't look into it. If it is important to you, maybe the nook is a better choice. I don't believe Amazon will include epub support in this generation of Kindles, mostly because distributing software updates via wireless is really expensive to them. For clipping material I suppose you could paste the clippings in a file (word document, html or plain text) and convert it using Mobipocket Creator easily. Never tried to do it, so I don't know how well it would work for you. No idea how you would do this with the nook, but there's probably some similar way. Bottomline, for me, is that if you're mostly worried about PDFs, there's not a big difference between kindle and nook. The kindle is less convenient, because you have to go through an extra conversion step for simple PDFs. For complex PDFs they seem to be on the same boat and the better choice is using some specialized tool. But we don't know, the nook is not out yet, and it may have a wonderful PDF implementation, who knows? I wouldn't count on that though (it's the Adobe implementation used by other readers, so people have previous experience with it).