TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘PDF’ Category

By Paul Biba

A price war might be breaking out among different brands of E Ink readers. The Foxit eSlick is now available on pre-order for only $229. It looks like a pretty standard unit, just like a Cybook, but for about $100 less. The downside of the unit is that it seems to support only TXT and PDF. Foxit does make a bit of a fuss, however, about its PDF software:

By making full use of Foxits superior PDF generation and viewing technology, eSlick enables its users to view their favorite newspapers, magazines or novels in PDF format with just one click of a button. With the use of Foxit’s PDF Creator, printable documents like TXT, PPT, DOC, XLS, HTML can be easily converted into a PDF document format and downloaded to the eSlick device in less than one minute. Once the documents are loaded into eSlick, users have the ability to access and view these documents at any given time. And with the Foxit Reader preinstalled in the eSlick device, it provides its users the best in PDF reading experience. The zooming feature allows users to magnify the page size from 50% to 400%. And in the reflow mode, users can read the text that has been automatically reorganized to fit the screen size and also control the font size via the menu.

The pre-order page is “coming” but they say delivery in 5 to 7 weeks. Also, they say that the unit can not be sold or shipped to locations outside the US.

The company, Foxit Software, is in Freemont, CA, and its main website is devoted to PDF creation, editing and reading software, so maybe there is something to the above claims.

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By David Rothman

“When I get sent a PDF, sometimes I just want to view it — I don’t always need to download and save it right then. So starting today, you’ll see a new “View” link next to PDF attachments you get in Gmail.” - Item in Gmail blog.

The e-book angle: Don’t forget the usefulness of Google Docs, too, for situations where you lack the usual PDF reader.

Related: Google Dictionary, available in Chinese, English, German, French and other major languages.

By Paul Biba

Macworld has a nice article by Adam Engst on how to slim down your PDFs. Since, unfortunately, so many e-books are only available in that format, perhaps some of our readers or publishers could pick up some tips.

You can never be too rich or too thin, the old saying goes, but when it comes to Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF), adding richness in the form of images and fonts causes otherwise svelte PDFs to start pining for elastic waistbands. Balancing quality and file size in PDFs can be tricky, but in my five years of publishing PDF books I’ve learned—through much trial and error—numerous tricks that can help you keep your PDFs small, eliminating problems with bounced e-mail attachments, unnecessarily long downloads, and higher-than-necessary bandwidth bills.

By Paul Biba

I published Clever Kindle promo for ‘Oz Chronicles’: Answer Oz question and qualify for contest to win free K machine, at 10 a.m. on Wednesday. At the same time I downloaded the PDF and sent it off to Amazon for free conversion to Kindle format. I didn’t get any response, which was strange as it usually takes only two or three minutes to get the book back. Tried again twice more and still no response. Then I decided to become a big spender and at about 10:30 a.m. submitted it to the “fee” version for conversion and forked over my $0.10. Well it’s now about 11:25 p.m. on Wednesday night and still no response. When I go to my Amazon bookshelf, I see it sitting there and listed as “Pending.” I wonder what’s going on.

Follow up:  9:15am the next morning.  Still “pending”

Follow follow up:  Posted a comment on the author’s website and he says there is nothing special about the PDF.  He’s looking into posting the work in another format.

By David Rothman

Further details here. From Adobe (with download info): “Critical vulnerabilities have been identified in Adobe Reader and Acrobat 8.1.2 and earlier versions. These vulnerabilities would cause the application to crash and could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.”

By David Rothman

A ZDNet blog has some tips for users. Helpful? One challenge is to shrink the PDFs to a decent size.

By Paul Biba

Amazon certainly seems to be taking the Kindle quite seriously in this political season. On the Amazon Kindle Blog they have announced an exclusive deal with Newsweek. While some people will bemoan the fact that Amazon is “locking up” content, I think that the bigger picture is more important. The more major media outlets become familiar with e-publishing the more we will see it flourish. Here’s the post:

Only on Kindle, Newsweek’s editors and writers will release four biographies on the presidential and vice presidential candidates. Four separate titles on Barack Obama, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and Joe Biden will become available on October 15: Mr. Cool: The Best of Newsweek’s Up-Close Coverage of Barack Obama, Mr. Hot: The Best of Newsweek’s Up-Close Coverage of John McCain, The Outsider: The Best of Newsweek’s Up-Close Coverage of Sarah Palin, and The Insider : The Best of Newsweek’s Up-Close Coverage of Joe Biden.
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Posted in Amazon, Amazon Kindle, PDF, blogs, e-book, e-books, ebook, ebooks, kindle | 1 Comment » | Read more..

By Chris Meadows

Someone on the Mobileread forums pointed out this handy piece of software being given away by Giveaway of the Day: a PDF to HTML converter, normally a $50 value. This could be useful for people looking to convert PDF documents to more readable e-book formats.

The giveaway will only last until the end of Thursday, September 25th in the US Pacific time zone. Be sure and back it up once you download it; you won’t be able to go back and download it again!