Reading a PDF on an eBook?

For me, One of the greatest creations of all time was the creation of the Kindle. I am an avid reader and have thousands of books. Kindle allowed me to easily take all of my books with me if I moved to a different country or just a few if I just going to the mountains for a weekend of skiing. And, the Paperwhite Kindle is even better because of integrated light, font sizing and long life battery.

Here's my problem... I have many books and documents in PDF format but they will not convert cleanly to any eBook reader. The formatting gets destroyed, some characters don't transfer, on and on. I have tried everything that I can think of and nothing works. Oh, I can convert it but it's pretty bad. I am currently reading a 1000 page history book which all the dates didn't convert leaving a '?' in their place...kind of important to have dates in a history book. LOL! Another example, I have a very good PDF of John Ross' 'Unintended Consequences' which is out of print and probably never will return so...

So, I am thinking of getting a small Tablet like a Amazon Fire or something cheap, running Adobe Reader on it so I can read my PDFs library the way it was meant to be read - meaning - correct font and formatting, illustrations/pictures/maps.

Questions:
1. Anyone has a Fire 8 or Fire 10 and reads PDF files?
(it supposedly can read them without Acrobat but supposedly a Kindle can also which is true to an extent...but the font is so small and you can't enlarge it so in truth it's impossible to read.

2. Anyone has a Tablet that they read PDFs
I assume this is a no-brainer but would like to hear of some inexpensive ones if you got one...

3. Recommendations?
I do have a small laptop but I hate reading on a laptop...

 

NEXUS ASUS
You might have to down load a pdf file to adjust the text size, but it shows up on
John Ross
Unintended
Consequences

 

An iPad will do it also. I use an old second gen...does kindle as well.

 

@BTPost Yeah, that is exactly what I was thinking of doing also. It works well, yes? I don't need anything expensive, just a tablet that will runs Adobe Reader and display correctly without any proprietary BS. I was thinking of the 10" Fire but from what I am reading I am not so certain it doesn't have some of the same problems as the Kindle with PDFs but think if you run Reader it would be okay but don't know anyone who has one...

@sec_monkey I will PM you about this "ASUS board/product" tomorrow as it is getting late here. But, I want something no bigger than a large paperback book. I want something that displays the PDF correctly, something rock solid...which I don't think I will get without running Adobe Reader but... I will do a quick query on the 'Nexus ASUS' then off to bed.

 

Try a program called Calibre its a great little library program that will convert any ebook file to about what ever type you want PDF Mobi AZW3 EPUB I use it with my Kindle my fire and my samsung tablets no issues and the guy updates about once a month

 

I vote for the iPad too.

Last year on Prime Day I bought an Amazon Fire for $49.00. It wasn't horrible but it clearly did not perform beyond its price tag. Not surprisingly, the only thing it did real well was the eBook reader and Amazon app. I've recently seen them on sale for $29.00.

I finally gave up and got an iPad. It does everything flawlessly. It's very smooth, never crashes or stalls. Third party apps work like they are native to the device.

That's the difference between the $49.00 Fire and the $450.00 iPad.

 

I second Calibre. Used it to convert tyo and from virtually every ebook flavor out there, including PDF. Maintains formatting, etc.

 

+1 on giving Calibre a try. Very easy to use and I convert Epub and PDF files to MOBI all the time. And it's free.

 

@hammerdrop99 and @DarkLight and @snake6264 Yes, I have used Calibre for years and it is without a doubt the best, all purpose, eBook Utility available. But, unfortunately, it also cannot convert PDF decently either. The best way I have found is to send the PDF to Amazon's converter, which takes a few minutes, then run it through Calibre, which gives a product far from perfect but is sort of readable. And, if you simply read the PDF using Calibre it uses Adobe Reader which is integrated.

Please don't misunderstand, Calibre is an amazing product and constantly improving. The problem is the PDF format is/was never made for eBooks. It was made for documents. It's not the converters fault it is simply a case of trying to put a square peg into a round hole.

I am thinking I am going to try a Amazon Fire 8 for around $65 since all I want it for is specifically for reading PDFs. This gets me 16Gb of ram which should be more than enough to run Adobe Reader and the book. I am not crazy about reading a thousand page book with Adobe Reader but its better than trying to guess at what is written and if it doesn't work then I am out only $65 bucks. I don't think there is any other solution except to do what @Tevin did and that is to purchase a decent Tablet which I probably need to do someday but currently don't have any use for it besides as a reader...I already have a huge and expensive TV for watching films and an expensive desktop computer that I built so...it would simple sit and gather dust until I wanted to read a pdf...better to get something cheaper and more specific to the problem.

 

I have a Gen 5 Fire and read PDFs, You may need to zoom in one some, but it does work.

The Ipad offers a bigger screen at 10X to 15x the cost...

 

Yeah I bought the Samsung 10 inch tablet before christmas for about 100 bucks

 

Thats what I paid for my iPad 2...

 

I have a large pdf library collection that I have put together over the last 10 years. And have tried to read them on many sizes and types of screens, computers, and tablets. I have to say my Best setup has been a 10" android tablet, any smaller and some Pdf's can be hard to read. Especially If there are drawings and pictures. At present I have about 28 Gigs of How to info. on just about any topic you might need. not only do I back up all info on DVD's, but also on USB drives that I can carry and use on any device.

 

I have come to the same conclusion. Trying to solve my problem cheaply, I bought a Kindle Fire 8 inch...I hate the damn thing. The main reason is it's like this giant Billboard and it's always trying to sell me something. I can't even delete some of the apps on it! They are some Kid things apps on it and I'm stuck with them. As soon as someone cracks it then I will hack it. I've actually thought of giving it away. I'll probably get a Samsung 10 inch tablet in the near future.