[dawgr]

I was going to buy a Kindle this week but this article is making me think twice. I thought it'd definitely be cheaper to buy books. What about PDFs? There are thousands of PDFs on the internet which you can get for free, is the quality of PDFs worse than books in kindle format? Do you have to scroll sideways or something? Or is the font smaller?

[rmc]

Yes, The Kindle can read PDFs. (I recently got a Kindle 3). However it's a second class reading experience. You can't change the font size (you can zoom in/out) etc. It's easy to convert a normal 'text pdf' to an ebook format suitable for Kindle (cf. http://www.technomancy.org/kindle/convert-books-to-kindle-fo...). If it's a PDF of scanned images from a book, then you'll need some OCR stuff.

[dawgr]

Okay thanks, so I can assume that hypothetically if I were to download text PDF books from certain places, then convert it to Kindle format, I would then be able to get first class reading experience? Are you happy with your Kindle 3 overall? I'm considering whether to get the one with 3G, but I don't know how good the webkit browser is, what do you think of it?

[bane]

I've found that PDFs kinda of stink (definitely much better on an iPad). However, txt files, and a few other ebooks formats work wonderfully. My Kindle is stocked with tons of Project Gutenberg books (that you can even download with the experimental web browser) and have found the reading experience really quite good.