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?
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