Brief Kindle 2 Review (PDF and international support)

Amazon recently introduced native PDF support for the Kindle 2 e-reader and dropped its price to $259. I have a fair number of programming PDFs and always avoided reading them systematically because of the eye strains associated with staring at a computer screen for a long time. E-readers, on the other hand, do not suffer from this problem as they use e-ink and do not require back light.

My Kindle 2 arrived last weekend. I played with it for several days and unfortunately decided to return it.

First, I actually liked the Kindle 2 a lot and really tried hard to keep it. The Kindle 2 has an excellent form factor and feels great in hand. Text was crisp, and the unit generally had good response. It's great for reading novels that do not need sophisticated formatting, On the other hand, PDF support, which is the main reason I bought it in the first place, was not entirely satisfactory. I was hoping for the contrary, but it turns out that the 6" screen was hardly enough to support a pleasant PDF reading experience. You can't resize, zoom, or reflow PDF documents. You can't change font sizes. The only option for larger fonts is to switch to landscape mode. It was a bit better that way, but I had to hit "Next Page" repeatedly to see the remaining portions of the page. It got tiring pretty quickly. Also if you have a two-column scientific paper, imagine how many "Previous Page" and "Next Page" clicks you have to endure. Ugh...

You do have the option to convert PDFs to a more Amazon-friendly format that supports larger font sizes:

• you can e-mail the PDF to [email protected] or [email protected] to convert it to Amazon's native format (AZW). The former automatically pushes the converted document wirelessly to your kindle for $0.10 each. The latter e-mails back a link to download the document yourself for free; then you can drag it onto the Kindle via its USB interface.
• you can use free software to convert the PDF yourself. I tried both MobiPocket Creator and Stanza. Both work similarly, but MobiPocket Creator is a bit more complex to use.

At the end of the day, however, none of the above was 100% satisfactory. It turns out that nobody was able to convert one of the technical PDFs I had with acceptable results. An entire family of fonts that was used to display source code could not be converted; therefore, all source code disappeared from the output, unacceptable for a programming book. Formatting such as tables and quotes was routinely converted to plain text and hard to understand. By the way, the same PDF displayed beautifully in Kindle's native PDF mode, all formatting preserved. That is, if you don't mind holding a magnifying glass to read it.

After my little experiment with the Kindle 2, I did learn some valuable lessons though. I didn't realize how important and convenient it was to be able to read one whole PDF page without back-and-forth "scrolling". That tells me that none of the 6" e-readers will give me a satisfactory experience even if they support  PDF reflowing (essentially reformatting the PDF with a larger font size but significantly altering the layout of the book in the process). Therefore, I've given up trying the Nook or any of the Sony readers similar in size.

It seems that after the Kindle 2, the only e-reader I'm currently interested in is its big brother--the 9.7" Kindle DX. I've seen several youtube videos that examine its PDF displaying capabilities. It seems promising. On the other hand, the DX still retails for $489, primarily for the lack of competition in its size range, I assume. You can buy a lot of books with that money.

So here goes my mini Kindle 2 review, primarily focused on its PDF capabilities. I hope the review's been helpful for somebody out there with similar requirements.

Overall, I remain very enthusiastic about the prospect of my owning a e-reader sooner rather than later. Don't take this review as a completely negative experience. Please see past the shortcomings of one particular offering for my needs. I'll report back when and if I muster enough courage up to get the DX.

P.S. The Kindle 2 does natively display PDFs with Chinese characters, therefore rendering things like the Unicode font hack partially obsolete--I say partially because I don't think Unicode support is enabled for the native Kindle format (AZW). Also I assume that Unicode PDF support is generic, and that other major languages are supported as well. I have not verified the assumption.

My wife and I do read a fair amount of Chinese content, so it was a huge plus for us. I'm sure there are a number of working workflows for getting a Chinese novel onto the Kindle 2; mine is as follows:

• Start with a document in a common format. You can download a lot of novels in plain text nowadays. I assume HTML or Word docs should also work but didn't try one myself.
• Make sure the encoding is UTF-8. If not, it's likely either GB or Big5 and needs to be converted to UTF-8. I only tried a GB document myself and assume a Big5 one should work similarly.
• I used Office 2007 to load the txt file and reformatted it using the SimHei font with a size of 20 (because you can't change font size in the Kindle 2, you need to do it now to get a comfortable size. If 20 doesn't work for you, just rinse and repeat :)
• I save the document as PDF (Office 2007 has a PDF writer!).
• Drag and drop to the Kindle 2 via USB.
  

That's it! Enjoy reading on the Kindle in your favorite language. No scary hack required.