Is Kindle 3 suitable for reading pdf book/magazine?

[blackcat555]

I am finding a suitable ereader now.

I think I will mainly read books and magazine in pdf format

I am quite interested in Kindle 3
In general, is Kindle 3 a suitable device for me?

[cuteseal]

The Kindle 3 itself is capable of handling PDFs pretty well - formats generally tend to work out most of the time, although some break from time to time.

The issue is the screen size - if the material you are reading is full page sized with lots of text you will need to do a lot of zooming in and scrolling around to read the text. Either that or you squint really hard and try to make out the tiny text. There is no reflow function (yet) with the K3 unfortunately.

So if the content is say, the size of a readers digest page then it would work perfectly. Bigger than that then I'd probably say no.

[WS64]

I havn't found ONE single PDF yet that I could read on my K3.

[TheKindleWorm]

Personally I don't like pdf files on my Kindle - I also didn't like them on my Sony Reader or my PocketBook 360 ebook readers. The only way I like to read .pdf files is on my 17" laptop screen. It's just that most pdf files are not configured for small e-ink screens.

Some people will say that they can be converted to be read on an e-ink device but I have converted .pdf files using a variety of software (Calibre, Mobipocket Creator etc) and I'm never completely happy with the results. It also seems too much effort to go to when I want to spend my time reading and not converting files.

Upshot is that I avoid pdf files except for reading on a much larger screened computer.

[desertgrandma]

What the KindleWorm says.

The DXG, however, reads them beautifully....

[zipangolo]

i've read some pdf with kindle 3 but i think the screen is too small. If you plan to read a lot of pdf with pictures, multicolumns and formulas choiche the kindle DX. Kindle 3 is for reading books.

[Wait_For_It]

I've read several PDFs on my Kindle and it's not too bad for me. The text is tiny, which really doesn't bother me, but it might be a problem for other people.

[Barty]

It depends on your tolerance for pain.

Personally, I own an iPad and I don't think THAT is very good for PDF and magazines either. But then, I have less than perfect vision.

What is good for PDF and magazine is actual full size printed paper. There yet to be a portable consumer device that makes reading PDF and magazines good enough for me.

Now if you're talking about reading stuff with mainly pictures in them, like comics or fashion magazines, then yeah the iPad is excellent for that.

[LDBoblo]

It's not ideal for A4/letter-sized PDFs. If they're A5 or smaller (ideally sized for the screen), they're no problem.

PDF as a format is no problem at all on the K3, if the layout and size are reasonable. With the exception of 2 MOBI files, everything I read on my Kindle is properly-sized PDF, and it's by far better than any of the reflowing formats.

[tomsem]

Magazines? Probably not.

Books? A qualified 'yes', I do this myself quite regularly. The page size of a book is often small enough that you can squeeze them onto K3's screen. The keys, for me, are to crop the margins/headers/page numbers off to maximize use of the limited real estate, and to bump up the contrast to make small text more readable. There's also the option to read in landscape mode, which makes text about 40% larger.

[paperwastage]

Originally Posted by desertgrandma

What the KindleWorm says.

The DXG, however, reads them beautifully*....

* reads them beautifully if they render properly, which happens about 90% of the time. other 10%, either it contains some feature that the DXG PDF reader can't read, or just crashes my DXG...

wish amazon will get onto updating DXG's firmware

[bZkindle]

Originally Posted by WS64

I havn't found ONE single PDF yet that I could read on my K3.

likewise. this is why I bumped up to DXG.

[bZkindle]

*double post, sorry*