pdf ebook reading software?

[moneo]

Hey guys, I'm new here so hello - great site!

I've got a lot of PDF ebooks and I've tried out a lot of pdf reading software, but I'm yet to find one that isn't frustrating to read long books on. I thought I'd share my experiences so far and see if anyone has any suggestions, or tips. How do you read your PDF books?

To me, a good ebook reader must be quick/responsive, show you where you are in the book, fill your screen so you can focus only on the book, look nice and have nice page turning/scrolling effects. Also it'd be great to have a virtual shelf similar to iBooks on the iPad, mainly because it's nice to see quickly the books you're reading right now, like you would leave your paper books by your bed.

So far I've tried out:

Adobe Reader - currently the best (as in, most comfortable) option for reading for longer periods of time if you ask me. Reading in full-screen, tweaking the full-screen settings: change background to white, make mouse wheel zoom in and left-click pan around. To change pages you can either pan or set the nice page turn effects (e.g. fade or slide). Lacking: a way to tell where you are in the book or how much is left of a chapter. It's also a bit laggy. Can't organise your books in the same app. A weird tip: if you're in full screen and want to be able to scroll/pan more than within just one page, i.e. keep panning page by page, press control-shift-h twice (it enables auto scroll), then you can! Otherwise it's impossible in fullscreen mode.

Adobe Digital Editions - really nice, great looking, but not very comfortable to use. Can't read in full screen. Love the bookshelves though. Maybe good choice if you have a big monitor.

Martview - this is really promising but it has some UI problems and some bugs. It's new, so worth watching!

Calibre - not great for me: pdf files just open in your default PDF reader, so it's only useful to sort your books, but no shelf-view.

NitroPDF, FoxitPDF, also the Linux PDF apps, etc. all very similar to Adobe reader, but not quite as good for books, to me at least.

KooBits: nice idea but bad UI and frustrating to use.


Does anyone have anything to add? :)

[anon]

NitroPDF, FoxitPDF, also the Linux PDF apps, etc. all very similar to Adobe reader, but not quite as good for books, to me at least.

I guess you aren't going to like SumatraPDF either, then.

[superpagla]

I kind of agree with anon-sbi.
I use NitroPDF cause of it's low process. Most of the PDF reader is similar. So it doesn't matter much.
It doesn't matter much when u want read that badly. I finished Twilight within a night then completed other four within 2 days & 3 nights. I only moved from computer for bathing and toilet. And that wouldn't make any difference if u use adobe, nitro etc etc.

[angelepubor]

ibooks supports PDF,and works well,but it support epub even better.
why don't you convert pdf to epub,epub can change size automatically,and works well on many devices

[monib]

hello, you have a pdf book and you want to read it for this purpose you should install the adobe reedier it helps you in this software you file will be open

[zot]

I agree that reading PDFs and other e-book formats on a computer is not an optimal experience.

My biggest complaint is that most e-books are shaped in a "tall-narrow" format while all PC screens today are made in a "short-wide" format -- and like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, e-books simply don't fit on PC screens. I would like to see a PDF reader that could at least re-format the text and page layout so that a 8.5x11 PDF would fit on a 16:9 monitor (rather than having every page cut in half) and with large images being re-sized and getting their own page. But rather than improve and innovate, it seems that competing companies just copy Adobe.

It seems that there is quite a lot of PDF software on the market, but most of it deals more with writing and converting, rather than reading PDFs (no doubt because the Adobe reader is free). I've tried a number of them, broadgun, PowerPDF, Abbyy, etc but I can't say any stood out as being better than Adobe; most were notably worse.

When I can find it, I greatly prefer the .CHM format to PDF, but not many e-books are released in that format, other than maybe computer/tech titles.

I'don't have much experience with the latest EPUB readers. I tried Calibre once but quickly uninstalled it since it was such a resource hog. Maybe some of them might work well with reading PDF formats.