Just got a Kindle.

zooterkin said:
Well, the Kindle would work, though for Letter or A4 PDF files the screen is a bit small, and panning around them is a bit tedious. A friend of mine was considering a Kindle for reading a lot of PDFs, but decided on an iPad instead (the iPad 1 has just dropped in price, due to the launch of the new one ;)).
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Also, remember that PDFs (although they can be displayed on the Kindle without conversion) can be converted to the Kindle format by emailing them to your @free.kindle.com address with "Convert" as the subject. It depends on the original PDF, but in my experience this often makes them much more readable on the Kindle than an unconverted PDF.
 
The readibility of PDF are indeed a point I am interested in.
The books that libraries (for instance the French National Library) offer for free are obviously scans of the books or fac similes, so with big "printing" artifacts.

I'm a lazy bum and would like to avoid conversion if possible.

Maybe i'll try to go to a store with my USB key and a sample document to see how well those eReader manage this. Speed is also somewhat an issue, I expect "pages" to turn with little to no delay, otherwise it would ruin my mood and annoy me.
 
Laeke said:
I'm a lazy bum and would like to avoid conversion if possible.
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Actually, you can be a lazy bum and still do the conversion. You email it to your @free.kindle.com address with the word "Convert" in the subject line, and Amazon takes care of the rest. It will download the next time you turn on your wireless connection.

I don't, however, know how it would handle scanned text. <shrug>

Maybe i'll try to go to a store with my USB key and a sample document to see how well those eReader manage this. Speed is also somewhat an issue, I expect "pages" to turn with little to no delay, otherwise it would ruin my mood and annoy me.
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Kindle "page turns" are almost as fast as you can turn the page of a book.
 
Laeke said:
The readibility of PDF are indeed a point I am interested in.
The books that libraries (for instance the French National Library) offer for free are obviously scans of the books or fac similes, so with big "printing" artifacts.

I'm a lazy bum and would like to avoid conversion if possible.
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I see. If they are just scans of documents and the pages are stored as images (i.e., they haven't been converted to actual text via OCR), then I believe conversion won't work, so the PDFs would need to be displayed without conversion.

Laeke said:
Maybe i'll try to go to a store with my USB key and a sample document to see how well those eReader manage this. Speed is also somewhat an issue, I expect "pages" to turn with little to no delay, otherwise it would ruin my mood and annoy me.
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I'm not sure about other readers, but with the Kindle you can't just plug in a USB drive into it, unfortunately. Might need to borrow a friend's device.
 
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AdMan said:
I'm not sure about other readers, but with the Kindle you can't just plug in a USB drive into it, unfortunately. Might need to borrow a friend's device.
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I was foolishingly believing that the store would humour me and take 5mn to pass it on the eReader via a computer, for a quick test.
But I believe this type of consumer service is deemed old fashioned now. :D
 
Laeke said:
I was foolishingly believing that the store would humour me and take 5mn to pass it on the eReader via a computer, for a quick test.
But I believe this type of consumer service is deemed old fashioned now. :D
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After writing my post I figured that that's what you meant.

You never know--it doesn't hurt to ask. :D
 
RoboTimbo said:
Are the ones on display at stores working models?
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I would suppose they have at least one demo model. eReaders are fairly new, and I suppose most people would ask to get a live impression to further form opinions. Like computers or televisions, I would expect at the very least some sort of looping demo displayed on screen.
 
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After a lot of research (and reading this thread), just ordered my Kindle & Oberon cover. Should have them next week. :D
 
Laeke said:
I would suppose they have at least one demo model. eReaders are fairly new, and I suppose most people would ask to get a live impression to further form opinions. Like computers or televisions, I would expect at the very least some sort of looping demo displayed on screen.
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I know you're in France, but I've been in stores (Barnes & Noble) here in the US where they've been demonstrating their ereaders, and they do let you play around with actual working models. I didn't ask if I could hook it up to a computer to view a document on a USB drive, but they did let me search for authors or favorite books and see what they looked like on the screen.

By the time I did this, I already had a Kindle, but I did want to see what the competition was like. :D
 
Darat said:
The newsfeeds and the format of the Independent, Guardian and the BBC downloads are superb - I've been reading more news than I've done in many a year since I got the Kindle and learnt from this thread about the newsfeeds.

ETA: A tip for those with Windows - add Calibre to your scheduled tasks and you don't need to remember to start Calibre to get your feeds; I have mine set for when I am walking the dog so I get back and have all my new feeds waiting on the Kindle to read whilst have a drink of The TEA.
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Ok done that and working well. Is there any way to stop calibre/kindle sending me an email to tell me that it has sent the downloads?
 
Lothian said:
Ok done that and working well. Is there any way to stop calibre/kindle sending me an email to tell me that it has sent the downloads?
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I can't see one. I think you only get them if you have wireless turned off, which is a bit pointless as you don't get that message until you turn the wireless on... (Of course, you could receive the message when you are connected to 3G but out of range of a WiFi link.) I've only been getting the notification since I've been turning off WiFi (I've been getting much shorter battery life than I expected, but I have read that indexing of new documents uses power, and I've downloaded a dozen or so in the last week, plus a couple of news feeds a day).

ETA: The message is from Amazon, not Calibre, I've had it for other documents I've sent to the Kindle.
 
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zooterkin said:
I can't see one. I think you only get them if you have wireless turned off, which is a bit pointless as you don't get that message until you turn the wireless on... (Of course, you could receive the message when you are connected to 3G but out of range of a WiFi link.) I've only been getting the notification since I've been turning off WiFi (I've been getting much shorter battery life than I expected, but I have read that indexing of new documents uses power, and I've downloaded a dozen or so in the last week, plus a couple of news feeds a day).

ETA: The message is from Amazon, not Calibre, I've had it for other documents I've sent to the Kindle.
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I haven't turned the WiFi off yet. Guess I will have to live with it
 
zooterkin said:
You haven't? Maybe I'm mistaken, then, I thought I only got the message if the document couldn't be delivered (because wifi was off).
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I am thinking I could simply tell the e mail package that Amazon are a spam sender. It won't stop the deliveries to the kindle but will stop the 'push' of the email to my phone (which is the really annoying bit).
 
Oh, wait, I am confused, sorry. Yes, I get the email too; I was thinking you were referring to the notification you get on the Kindle if the wifi is not connected when the document is sent to it.

I don't get notifications on my phone, and I just ignore the emails. :) I'm not sure I'd want to ignore all messages from Amazon as spam, some may be important. Can your email package ignore the messages based on content, rather than just the sender? From Calibre the message will have your email address in the body.
 
Laeke said:
...snip...

Speed is also somewhat an issue, I expect "pages" to turn with little to no delay, otherwise it would ruin my mood and annoy me.
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That was one the last reasons I had for not getting a Kindle (or Sony ereader), although the latest Kindle turns pages quicker I thought the strange "wipe" that happens between page refreshes would be annoying but I found in practice it isn't.
 
Lothian said:
Ok done that and working well. Is there any way to stop calibre/kindle sending me an email to tell me that it has sent the downloads?
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I don't get an email of any kind - the periodicals just appear in my home menu. Show me your settings and I'll show you mine!
 
Darat said:
I don't get an email of any kind - the periodicals just appear in my home menu. Show me your settings and I'll show you mine!
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Which ones would you like to see? Amazon, kindle, calibre or Gmail?

I set a Gmail rule to archive the notification and I didn't get a notification when the Guardian, Telegraph and Indie arrived this morning
 
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