Help choosing the right ereader: requirements listed

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

The only downside is that depending on the PDF, the quality of the conversion can range anywhere from decent to absolutely horrendous.
Due to the nature of PDF as an output-only format, it can be very difficult to get usable text+layout information from one.

See the sticky in the Calibre ==> Conversion subforum for more details, and good luck.

I personally don't like pdfs on my ereader. They are too hard to manipulate. That is even with ones I made myself. It took me 4 or 5 tries to get them readable and even then it was a pain to navigate. That was about a 50 page pdf. It was a list of my cookbooks.

[Tarana]

Originally Posted by Stiletto

I wrote an update at the bottom of my post saying I'd decided to go for the Kindle Oasis, I'm not sure if you saw that; if not, perhaps I should edit and put that at the top?

In any case, thank you for your comments. The PDFs are books, the traditional type, not multi-column magazines. My plan is to convert them to another format using Calibre, so reading them (plus highlighting and making notes) on the Kindle shouldn't be an issue.

Do you see a downside to this?

I would have liked a waterproof device, but it's more important to me to have a device I can read well in bright sunlight and is easy on my eyes for prolonged reading in different settings. I'm not convinced that a tablet, even with an anti-glare covering, would be enjoyable and comfortable enough for me. Another poster linked me to a company that waterproofs the Paperwhite. Perhaps at some point in the future there'll be something similar available in Europe for the Oasis. *crosses fingers*

Sorry, I did miss the update (my fault!). To convert pdf to another format, get ABBYY Transformer. They often have sales on it for $30-40. It is FAR SUPERIOR to Calibre for conversion of PDFs. Here's a link (Moderator, if this isn't allowed, please delete link). I have significant vision issues, so if a book is not available in ebook, I have it scanned and then use ABBYY Transformer to convert it to epub. From there, I can edit and convert to mobi using Calibre. The process is a little time consuming the first time or two you use it. If you were doing a LOT of books or non-english languages, ABBYY Finereader is a better choice.

The advantage of the waterproof skins over say a double Ziplock bag around your reader is that the touch screen is not affected much. I'm sure they have them in Europe. After all, you have factories and hospitals just like we do. They may use a different terminology, however.

[eschwartz]

The usual advice for people who have to convert PDFs in a serious fashion is to use ABBYY Finereader. (The professional ebook producers who hang out here will swear by this product.)
This is assuming you need to OCR it to get a good conversion... but so so many PDFs do need exactly that. On account of they use images of the text, sometimes with an OCR layer underneath but not a very good OCR usually.

Of course, depending on your PDF you may get lucky, and it will have clean text to convert to EPUB. You will still have to make sure to get the line unwrapping correct, and formatting will be mostly lost... that too is where professional OCR software comes in handy, since I believe it will detect and imitate far more of the layout.