How is the PocketBook 626 Touch Lux 3 when it comes to reading scientific PDFs?

[cheflo]

Thanks Pajamaman, the Onyxes with the pen certainly look cool, but they are rather expensive unfortunately. Is the Boyue good with PDFs (in terms of speed, annotations and multicolumn layouts?) if I choose a suitable app?

[cheflo]

nhedgehog, I am getting a playback error when pressing the play button for both videos.

"An error occurred. Please try again later. Playback ID: aKJWXO0RlqC4OSbN)"

[cheflo]

I was able to load the videos via the email notification I get from the mobile read forum. Watching now!

Here are the link to youtube if anyone else has troubles viewing it inline in the forum:
Big https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBVQwWq5nbg
Small https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtCg2zG8Dnk

[cheflo]

That looks GREAT!!
The most important thing for me is to see that the column mode ignores column breaking figures instead of trying to change the zoom level to fit the image. From the look of it, I am guessing that 2-column mode is just setting the zoom level to 200% and then traversing the left part of the screen followed by the right half. If so, it is a simple and very useful approach to handle 2-column PDFs.

Together with the physical page/section forward button, this is a killer combo for me. No risk of accidentally changing the zoom or clicking a reference in the text that link to the bibliography on the last page (the latter was a recurring problem when trying on the kindle). I think the KOreader can do something similar, but since the Pocketbook has highlighting and note-taking in PDFs, it is the best PDF experience I have seen and read about among the 6" e-readers.

I greatly appreciate that you thouroughly went through al the modes. Based on what I saw, I will probably use column mode as the default, and when I need to view an image, I will switch to landscape mode. Actually, I might even be able to read the entire article in landscape mode depending on the text size and ability to crop margins, that is something I will need to try myself.

I guess the downsides would include a long time to open the large PDF and a little sluggish behavior when zooming in the big one, but these actions will be a small part of my overall workflow. I'm impressed it rendered that complex image in the big PDF at all, and that holding it in memory didn't seem to affect the speed of traversing the rest of the document.

This video settles it for me. I will return the Paperwhite that I ordered previously when it arrives. I ordered a Pocketbook 626 on Amazon.ca for 180 CAD (including tax and shipping), which I am now REALLY looking forward to receiving (although the expected delivery is in about a month ).

Thank you so much again, I really appreciate that you spent the time to help me with this decision! If I find something worth mentioning in addition to your videos, I will make one myself and document the workflow I settle on for reading and annotating scientific PDFs.

[nhedgehog]

Glad I could help with the decision. The PB626 is certainly worth its money. You can run Koreader on Pocketbook too and use "my" selector app to switch between the two pdf-readers. The slow start of the bigger pdf was a bit of a show off but intercepting by using a button or screenclick seemed to help. I tried it again now and it did start within 10s while clicking the foreward button often to get it out of the sluggish behaviour.

Edit: The only thing I found better about Koreader is the option to change the contrast in pdfs.

[Pajamaman]

Originally Posted by cheflo

Thanks Pajamaman, the Onyxes with the pen certainly look cool, but they are rather expensive unfortunately. Is the Boyue good with PDFs (in terms of speed, annotations and multicolumn layouts?) if I choose a suitable app?

No idea. I don't read PDFs that way.

[mobama]

There is just one problem with Touch Lux 3 when it comes to reading pdf files: Too little RAM. In some cases you have to wait minutes to open up a file and turn pages. In every other respect, the inbuilt reading app compares well to other e-readers out there.

[markony]

My experience on the Touch Lux 3 is that a djvu version of a pdf file opens much more quickly and is smaller in size. You can convert at various sites on line. I generally download djvu files rather than pdf from archive.org because of this better response.
Alternatively use k2pdfopt to "improve" the response time of the pdf. I've taken a 160MB pdf, processed through k2pdfopt default settings and the opening and paging time was vastly improved. This is a very helpful piece of software.
Again an alternative is koreader, which has a good pdf range of options (uses a version of k2pdfopt built in), with a nightmode too!
However pdf's seem to be encoded in various forms/quality and not all can be guaranteed to work well on ereaders via the above methods.