Krause PDF's on Kindle

OzzyAndy

My mum was just showing me her Kindle (a book reading mobile device) and I tried putting a Krause PDF on there and it reads it, thought it could be quite handy. Before I rush out and buy a Kindle, just wondering if anyone here has used Krause on a kindle or any other devices such as Ipad. Any recommendations or comments,
Thanks,
Andrew

skingspan

I put a couple of my krause pdf files on my kindle. There does not appear to be any zoom functionality on the kindle pdf viewer so reading the small text is difficult. You will also probbaly us most of the capacity of the kindle if you put 1600 - present on there. I thought aboiut using it for coin shows, much easier than dragging the cataloges along.

Stork

Skinspan: which Kindle do you have? I had read the newer K3 did do a better job with PDFs, but I haven't played around with them at all.

BTW does anyone have any idea how big the PDFs are? Amazon will convert PDFs to the amz file type. There might be a limit on file size however, I'd have to check.

Do you get the PDFs directly from Krause? Or do they use other file types like mobi/prc/epub?

Hmmmm, the possibilities are interesting here. A small K3 is easy to tote around. If i could get a decently formatted Krause on there I'd be pretty happy! (I'm thinking coin show type thing here...). I already have plans to upload my coin lists to take with me...easy to reference on a small, light, portable, one-hand-only device.

Cathy



edited to add: Ozzy...if you are interested in a Kindle I can sing the praises for a long time, I LOVE mine. If you are a big reader then the small/light eInk display type readers are great. I happen to love Amazon and their support of the device is fabulous. Many people love the Sony reader or the Nook too.

If I was after cookbooks, magazines, journals, textbook type stuff I would lean towards either the Kindle DX, or more likely, one of the tablets like iPad or the Xoom type thing. For long term reading the LCD/backlit screens kill my eyes...but for shorter stints it's okay. The Kindle and similar readers are lighter and more comfortable than the bigger devices, and even than most books!

The tablets (or pcs, macs, laptops, smartphones etc) can have the Kindle (or Nook etc) reading application too--though Apple is messing around with the app developers and it's possible Amazon, Nook, Sony (and Hulu, Rhasphody) and a lot of other big retailers may pull their apps as Apple wants 30% of many types of transactions.

Most of the readers use some kind of more-or-less proprietary file format (Amazon more so, Sony less so, Apple/Nook more so etc). Anything I buy at Amazon is pretty much read on a Kindle or Kindle App. Same with Apple and Nook, though they use epub. It does not mean I am stuck only buying Amazon however. I buy from a lot of places and use a compatible format such as mobi, prc or pdf. No epub on Kindle however. The others tend to use epub based files.

The bigger booksellers/publishers use DRM to limit the files to a specific device...but most allow usage on multiple devices. In other words I can read my book on my Kindle, my kid's itouch, my old Kindle and my Kindle app all at once. I can't drag and drop it however.

I am totally digressing here, but I am a person who never thought regular reading would be interesting on a device, but the Kindle proved me wrong. I'm living in my tiny house with 400+ books on my reader, and not piled into overflowing bookcases. Did I mention I love my Kindle?

In any case, if you want something to read books on then the Kindle would be great. If you want to look at graphic heavy material then the tablet would be a nice, portable way to go.

spoon

I was working on hacking the PDF up in Adobe to just the bits I want, but that got too time consuming. The whole thing in one file kept crashing the ereaders on my old ipod touch 2g. Haven't tried Kindle but hear PDFs with images can be annoying on it.

The files are a few hundred MB, under half a GB though. If I'm reading this right, the Kindle PDF transfer service doesn't play nicely with files over 5MB.

I really wanted to convert the catalogs to epub but the three column layout and pricing data tables make that a near impossible pain to neatly pull off. Since epub is pretty much structured html, here are some demos:

This is what the Adobe Export to HTML looks like.. utter crap.
This is what Mobipocket can do.. better, but still a mess if you're interested in prices

OzzyAndy

My Krause PDF's (from the books) vary in size, with the 1900-2000 on being about 500 Mb. It seemed fairly slow to navigate on the kindle (3) but I could zoom in, didn't get to see if there were quicker ways of getting to specific pages or bookmarking etc. Thats why I'm wondering if anyone else uses it and could make recommendations or at least see if it's convenient enough that they take it to shows etc.

Also looking for recommendations on other mobile devices for the same thing.