A little disappointed

[Yolande]

Hello all,
I'm new to pocketbook. I've just got myself a 360, with high hopes. But so far, it's been causing me some anxiety. Here's why...

1) Many of my PDF books don't read properly, cannot reflow, cannot scroll properly etc. I read that some PDFs don't work so well on these ebook readers. My question is : how do I tell which ones don't work well? Are they the ones with lots of pictures? Because I find that the PDFs of children's books with illustrations come up just blank or black.

2) I converted one of those children's books using [pirate site]. Now I can see it on the reader, but it does not respond to the zoom or reflow (I thought epubs were supposed to reflow), so I can only see the left half of each page . How can I convert the books so that I can zoom or scroll across the whole page so that my daughter can read it?

I'm trying not to stress about this, but it's occupying my mind. I've got to get it off my chest so I can get on with caring for my 3 young kids

HELP!!!

[Flinx]

The limited memory of the readers makes problems on large pictures. The device has to rescale the pictures to the display size. If the device has not enough memory to finish the action, then you will get bad results, because the operating system has no hard disk to swap, but the most algorithms used in Linux programs don't expect memory limits.
For example I could crash my Cybook with handmade ePub books with a large cover picture - it did reboot while calculating the preview picture for the library.
I do not have a solution - maybe one of the many PDF editors has a batch function to rescale all pictures to a maximum size?

[paola]

Perhaps it has nothing to do with your problem, but first of all have you checked you have the latest firmware version (15.3)?

[Yolande]

Flinx, Paola, thanks for your feedback. I'm a novice with these techie things, and they scare me! What are PDF editors?
Paola, how do I know which firmware I am running at the moment? And where do I get the latest Firmware? Is it stable?

I'm just wondering why some of my PDFs read beautifully, are scalable/reflowable, and others are not. Am I supposed to use a particular reader with PDFs?

[SkyDream]

Originally Posted by Yolande

I'm just wondering why some of my PDFs read beautifully, are scalable/reflowable, and others are not. Am I supposed to use a particular reader with PDFs?

PDF's are a tricky thing. There are many ways to format them and some of them are not very friendly to eReaders. You can't see it from outside but ony after opening them on your reader. The Sony PRS-650 users guide is a PDF but shows very well on eReaders as it's formatted to do so. There is nothing you can to except convert them to another format but that may be to techy for you. Better go for the PRS-650 which has a much better PDF support.

[Poppaea]

PDF are files actually not made for ereaders. This is a file made to mirror a DIN A4 letter. Now look at your reader and than look at a letter and you know what the problem is. Either you break them, which is bound to bring problems with it or you resize them to the page size of your reader screen.

All in all PDF's are to be avoided. If you have to read them you should go for a 9.7" reader or a 10" tablet or your PC.

As far as reader reflow it looks like Sonys and the bigger Pocketbooks do a fairly decent job.

[Sunlite]

PDF come in two flavors: text based and image based.

The software on the Pocketbook can only reflow the text based version. To test if a PDF is text or image based, open it on your computer an try to select and copy a couple of words. If you can select single words, the PDF is most likely text based. If you can only select the whole page/ image, it is probably image based.

Software that converts PDF to a natively reflowable format normally works well to acceptable for text based PDFs. For image based PDFs they only convert the images to another format containing the same images. This new books are then not reflowable.

This probably does not help you, but it is important to know:

- Most PDF are not made for ebook readers
- Most ebook readers are not made for PDF

The combination of those two often make for a lot of disappointment.

[fjtorres]

The commercial pdf converters from Nuance and AbbeySoft (among others) convert pdfs to useful formats by printing to pages to memory and OCRing the image to recreate the original text stream.
One way to test the functionality of the PB360 pdf viewers is to take a text-based document (rtf, doc, html) with and without pictures, format it to your liking, and "print" it to a pdf file using the default settings. Then repeat the exercise setting the output page size to 3in by 4in and 4.5in by 6in. You may have to go back and adjust the text document formatting (font size, margins, line spacing) to get something suitable for a small screen.
You can use this same approach to convert your text only pdfs.
You should also take a look at the free creator app from mobipocket.com; it converts pdfs to mobi format and in the process it drops a very clean html document in the conversion directory. Just make sure to install it in professional version to get the pdf input version.

What is going on is that the PB readers support 3 different breeds of files: ebook files (epub, mobi, fb2) that (generally) convey book structure and formatting; electronic document files (rtf, doc, txt, html) that only convey content and formatting, to varying degrees; and electronic paper files (pdf, djvu) that mostly convey the appearance of the original sheet of paper for archival purposes. Which is why some pdfs behave as digital microfiche and only offer zoom and panning options, the file was only intended to be viewed as a printout.

The rule of thumb is that pdfs are best viewed on paper. Anything else, even big color screens, is a degraded experience. Small b&w screens are just about the least suitable vehicle for viewing pdfs. Sorry.

Hopefully you can find a way to convert your files to something useful.

[Yolande]

Thank you all for the information. It is comforting to know that I shouldn't hope too much on PDFs. So now, I should focus more on the epubs, and just try the PDFs. If they don't work, and I cannot convert them successfully, then I shouldn't stress .

[SkyDream]

Originally Posted by Poppaea

PDF are files actually not made for ereaders.

That's not true. PDFs can be properly formatted but most are not. I can read a lot of PDFs on my 650 without problems due to the good reflow capability.

Originally Posted by Poppaea

All in all PDF's are to be avoided. If you have to read them you should go for a 9.7" reader or a 10" tablet or your PC.

As far as reader reflow it looks like Sonys and the bigger Pocketbooks do a fairly decent job.

Forget the bigger Pocketbooks. They do not reflow but zoom.

[paola]

Originally Posted by Yolande

Flinx, Paola, thanks for your feedback. I'm a novice with these techie things, and they scare me! What are PDF editors?
Paola, how do I know which firmware I am running at the moment? And where do I get the latest Firmware? Is it stable?

I'm just wondering why some of my PDFs read beautifully, are scalable/reflowable, and others are not. Am I supposed to use a particular reader with PDFs?

Hi Yolande,
please take this as a pinch of salt, since I will put my hands on my 360 only tomorrow - but from the "settings" menu there should be something along the lines of "device info" which will tell you what version you have. What most people say here is that 15.3, the latest version, is rock stable (though jackie_w had problems in making the hacked version of adobe work with it - Adobe reader is the software used to view files protected with Adobe's DRM; the "hacked" version, if I got it right, allowes you to use CSS files to customise things like margins, fonts, and the like).
You can download this latest version of the firwmware here, wehre you will also find the instructions for the firmware update (under "upgrade manual") - I am pretty null when it comes to techie stuff, so if I can do it (I updated my PB903), anybody can

A final thing on PDF - as other people suggested on this forum, you can pretty easily remove margins from your pdf files by using briss -pretty foolproof, it should increase readability if you can't reflow your files.

[troll05]

Originally Posted by paola

A final thing on PDF - as other people suggested on this forum, you can pretty easily remove margins from your pdf files by using briss -pretty foolproof, it should increase readability if you can't reflow your files.

This is one option I tried for the Sony 350 of my wife , but I'm not very content with it, because IMO it's still to small for 5" readers.

Try converting them using a tool called Mobi Creator,it makes fairly acceptable results and is quite easy and foolproof to use.
You can further convert them with Calibre to epubs, that has some advantages for storing, but there is no real need to do so.

Have fun with your PB

[paola]

Originally Posted by troll05

This is one option I tried for the Sony 350 of my wife , but I'm not very content with it, because IMO it's still to small for 5" readers.

Try converting them using a tool called Mobi Creator,it makes fairly acceptable results and is quite easy and foolproof to use.
You can further convert them with Calibre to epubs, that has some advantages for storing, but there is no real need to do so.

Have fun with your PB

thanks for the tip - I am planning not to read any pdf with the 360, actually, but you never know, adn more info is always better thann less!

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by Yolande

Thank you all for the information. It is comforting to know that I shouldn't hope too much on PDFs. So now, I should focus more on the epubs, and just try the PDFs. If they don't work, and I cannot convert them successfully, then I shouldn't stress .

Yolande,

Before you give up on your PDFs, try opening them with pdfviewer instead of the Adobe application.

Pocketbook 360 has 2 PDF reading applications and two "text" reading applications. When you want to open a book, hold the button down for a few seconds instead of a quick press and release. Then choose which reader to use to open the book. For each book, the last reader that you opened it with becomes its default reader. Each time you switch readers for a particular book, you lose last page read, bookmarks, etc.

Some books are about the same in either reader, some open much faster and/or have less problems with pictures than the other. Neither is best for every book. But, for the books that I have read so far, the default reader has more problems than the other reader. ( I am a relatively new PB 360 user myself.)

There is a thread somewhere in this forum about changing the default reader for the PB360. I have not tried that yet.

[jshzh]

Originally Posted by SkyDream

PDF's are a tricky thing. There are many ways to format them and some of them are not very friendly to eReaders. You can't see it from outside but ony after opening them on your reader. The Sony PRS-650 users guide is a PDF but shows very well on eReaders as it's formatted to do so. There is nothing you can to except convert them to another format but that may be to techy for you. Better go for the PRS-650 which has a much better PDF support.

I am thinking about PRS-650 too. If you close a PDF book and reopen it, will you get the same page setting (locked zoom-in mode) ?