PDFs are formatted and look WAY nicer than epubs. Which PDF ereader is best today???

[lori87]

It's almost October 2019, just curious what some of the best ereaders are on the market that display PDFs nicely?
I wish I could switch to an ereader that I can just use for strictly PDFs, they look so much nicer than epubs and mobis.

What are some of the best ereaders on the market for reading books in PDF?


Is there ANYTHING? I don't want a tablet at all.

[Quoth]

Large expensive ones. Depends on the PDF's page size. Sometimes using ImageMagick or some other tool to physically remove margins on scanned to PDF means more PDFs work on 8" and 10". Really a 10" is minimum (expensive) and 13" approx needed to show all PDFs.
Note some large eink devices are ONLY for electronic paper, i.e. PDFs, text & handwritten annotation but no ebook support.

Very few actual novels are PDF unless pirate copies. Real ebooks are Kindle/epub, never PDF.

You can easily find 10" and 13" (approx) eInk devices on these forums and on Amazon. Some seem to have issues with software quality. The Sony ones in particular are electronic paper and need a Sony host application.

[crich70]

PDF (Personal Document Format) wasn't really made for ebooks to begin with. It's for sending documents via email from one place to another where it can be printed out again.

[John F]

Originally Posted by crich70

PDF (Personal Document Format) wasn't really made for ebooks to begin with. It's for sending documents via email from one place to another where it can be printed out again.

Isn't it Portable Document Format?

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by John F

Isn't it Portable Document Format?

Yes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF
Adobe, who invented it, agrees.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by crich70

PDF (Personal Document Format) wasn't really made for ebooks to begin with. It's for sending documents via email from one place to another where it can be printed out again.

The email aspect is irrelevant. It's for proofing paper documents on screen and ensuring they print identically anywhere.
MS Doc and other WP formats certainly don't because local fonts, version of editor, OS and printer affect the rendering.

[ratinox]

Originally Posted by FrustratedReader

The email aspect is irrelevant. It's for proofing paper documents on screen and ensuring they print identically anywhere.
MS Doc and other WP formats certainly don't because local fonts, version of editor, OS and printer affect the rendering.

Exactly. PDF is what's known as a page description language: it describes the appearance of each individual page and the appearance of every element on each page. Formats like HTML and MOBI are markup languages (this is the "ML" in HTML): they describe how the text is presented.

E-book readers and web browsers are essentially the same thing: they render marked-up text and format it for the constraints of the device. Digital paper devices like Sony's PDF DPT series work like printers: they present pages exactly as they were typeset.

So it's like FrustratedReader said: if you want an e-Ink "printer" then something big like the DPT series is what you want. But if you want an e-book reader then those e-Ink printers are exactly what you *don't* want.