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What's the best device for reading a long PDF?

#Poll #EvanPoll

  • Phone (4%, 20 votes)
  • Laptop (33%, 148 votes)
  • Tablet (50%, 221 votes)
  • Kindle (11%, 51 votes)
440 voters. Poll end: 1 year ago

Evan Prodromou reshared this.

inkjet printer
I recently read a whole book in PDF format on my iPad and it was like a long magazine. Form factor worked well.
I have a pop thing that’s magnetic, for my phone. It doesn’t stick as well to the iPad but it worked to help hold it in a comfortable way.
convertible laptop/tablet is my vote which probably means 'tablet, but with extra steps.'
@ok_devalias why would that be better than a tablet on its own?
I don't /personally/ need a phone, tablet, laptop, and desktop for myself. A laptop/tablet lets me double dip, plus it's a 15" screen which is nice as a mobile yet stable sheet music display for my keyboard.
I use a reMarkable eink tablet for this, but I might pick a different one today as I'm not thrilled with some of the changes they've been making.
phone is not wide enough, I don’t have a kindle, and I can’t sit upside down on my couch with a laptop (I mean I can but it doesn’t end well), so tablet of course.
Desktop with a 4k display.
pdf is SHITTY format for reading ☝️
These seem to be orthogonal concerns. The device I choose to read on is whichever is most convenient at the time. It generally has very little to do with the length of the material.

That said, I find myself reading the vast majority of my PDFs on my phone, mostly because it is always with me and I can easily resume reading nearly any time.
there are other ebook readers than the Kindle. Is this subliminal advertising?
Tablet, in bed, with pillow supporting it at the optimal angle
for me, anything that outputs on a portrait (as opposed to landscape) screen and said screen is at least as large as an A4 sheet.
probably my Remarkable, but I haven't yet tested it.
I am tending to use a TTS add on to many document. So i listen/follow along.
@spacehobo that's a great option if you hate trees, yes.

If that's your goal, you can also just buy reams of printer paper and throw them directly in the trash.

You can yell "Fuck you, environment!" and "Take that, arboreal species!" as you do it. Probably very cathartic.

Weirdly, though, a lot of people aren't trying to deforest the planet as fast as possible, so they're going to need some alternative reading tools.

No accounting for taste, I guess!
You're right. Computers run on electricity from coal power plants. Best to keep them running full-tilt ALL THE TIME. You'll show that filthy coal: you'll BURN IT ALL UP!!!
@spacehobo my computers run on waterfall magic!
Anyway, I wasn't kidding.

I tend to print long documents 2-up, double-sided or 4-up double-sided depending on the font sizes. Black text on a white background is too much eyestrain for me on a backlit screen, and I often want to mark the things up and spread a bunch of stuff around on a table side-by-side.

Computers are pretty good for HTML or epub or whatever, because they just reflow to fit and you can just style them for dark mode. But PDFs are designed for printing, and have things like "pages" built into the model. If you don't want me to print it out, don't use a print-specific format like PDF!
@spacehobo yes, I get it. I feel pretty bad printing out a lot of pages for a single read. But if it's something I'm going to re-use, it may make sense to print it.
Three ring binder. 🤓
rocking chair in front of a fireplace
Voted "tablet" but it's really "it depends". If it's linear text that I'm reading from beginning to end without diagrams or pictures, my Kobo (like a Kindle but better and comes from a good Canadian company) is the more comfortable choice. If it's a long document that I have to jump around in a lot, I'll want the tablet. (Deadtree version if I have to jump around a lot)

That said, I usually don't get documents for reading beginning to end in PDF. Those tend to be the other kind.
Scientific paper?

If so, Zotero. Then all of the above. With annotations ahared
it’s page description format, right? I print it out onto pages.
I have one of my screens rotated to portrait and works a treat for reading documents.
multiscreen desktop because heck if I'm gonna make it away and back to any other screen when (not if) something comes up and distracts me from the task.
An observation, not necessarily a criticism: three items have generic names; one has a brand name.
@koherecoWatchdog There's no way the reading experience on an olpc is better than any of these choices.
The OP simply said “best”. Best in what? You’ve obviously not used an OLPC. Phone, tablet, & laptop can all be scratched off because you can’t read a backlit LCD at all in sunlight & batteries will die before you finish reading. Kindle can be scratched off b/c it’s proprietary closed-source, brings DRM, & supports one of the most unethical corps in the world: #Amazon.
@koherecoWatchdog I've used an olpc, but not for reading long documents.

If it's good for you, great.
I use an #OLPC for /only/ two purposes: reading long PDFs & flashcards. I have a smartphone, desktop, & laptop, which are suitable for short PDFs but not long ones. It’s more relaxing to the eyes to get away from the backlit LCD, go outside, and read off epaper- which is nearly as good as reading hardcopy paper.
#olpc
Actually, laptop that has a flip-around touch screen... but more like a tablet.

Honestly, find a copy as an ePub so I can read it on my eReader instead.
@jkramersmyth why is that better than a regular tablet?
I like the mulit-purpose aspect. I get to have my full-power laptop with a decent keyboard, but I can also fold it over and rotate it into portrait position to read a PDF.
Strange poll. Why are the first three alternatives generic categories and the fourth a specific product? Shouldn't they all be one or the other?
Liquid Mode in the Adobe Acrobat app for Android is actually very nice. Although I'm pretty sure it's sending copies of all my PDFs to Adobe, and therefore at least 3 intelligence agencies
phone. On a tablet you can just read the PDF
@mcc this is why tablets rule
@mcc
@est@mcc OK so we all agree the answer is tablet
@est well, I've actually got more used to reading long documents on a phone. I prefer it for ebooks at least. It's just you specified PDFs, and *those* have funny formatting, so it's just not an option on a phone without something like liquid mode, which is imperfect.
It depends a bit on the content, but really, anything but the phone would be okay in most cases.
@gwhilts the question isn't what's ok
Interesting results.

I have to read a lot of PDFs for my courses right now of 50+ pages.

I find reading on a phone too difficult. Even when I let the PDF Reader reflow the document, it's still hard on my eyes.

A laptop is OK but not great. Big screen, but it's kind of far away on my lap.

My Kindle is nice for reading, but it doesn't show preformatted full-page PDFs well.

I'm interested in trying out a tablet or iPad. We'll see.

Thanks for the responses everyone.
To everyone who answered "desktop" or "laptop plugged into a big screen": really? For a 100-page document? That seems really uncomfortable.
To everyone who said "print": really? You'd waste 100 pages of paper for some document you read only once? That seems really irresponsible.
I mean, I appreciate the lols of giving a response that's not one of the poll choices, but c'mon.
You might think about a Kindle Scribe or a 10 or 12 inch Boox eink device.
@jesse maybe Lenovo's new ThinkBook Twist?...
@jesse How much longer do we need to wait for a large, bright-color e-ink device? I see the 7" Boox one, but that is so small - and it looks so un-saturated.
@basil I think I saw a screenshot of someone, @lmorchard , maybe, reading old Byte magazine PDFs in VR?
I tried to do this with SICP right before going on a trip in the year 2001, in a pre ebook era. I ran out of paper halfway through. This is why I have read exactly half of SICP
yes, I regularly print out papers if I'm having trouble reading them at my desktop. It helps a lot with eye strain, which is a problem I unfortunately have in spades. I can also write on them and annotate as I go. Paper can be recycled easily, the same is not true for a tablet or iPad that is built to die in several years.
I voted “tablet”, but I think printing is fine if your alternative is buying a tablet. I expect the environmental impact of printing, let’s say, 100,000 pages is still far less than the impact of producing an iPad.

According to some quick searching, the carbon emissions are roughly the same (100kg of CO2), but (a) computers also use a lot of rare minerals and (b) we can massively reduce the impact of paper much more easily than electronic devices (for example by using recycled paper).
not with a great setup and chair. Do it all day.
What is uncomfortable about using a proper screen?
@bplein sitting in an office chair staring at a screen, and navigating with keyboard or mouse.
It’s better on your neck than using a laptop on your sofa. Ergonomics are important.

About 10 years ago I gave up using my laptop as my primary personal computer (although I still have one for work but it’s attached to two LCDs) and switched to a desktop.

I can do a lot on my phone. But I no longer have a laptop sitting on the ottoman. I have an excuse to keep work limited mostly to work hours. And I can read PDFs 🤣
@bplein so, this is for reading book-length PDFs for hours.
If you are treating it like a book, I can see your point.

If one is actively bookmarking and copying relevant texts to a note app, then I’d go with the desktop any day.
Did you hear from the reMarkable tablet enthusiasts? Sounds like it might be ideal for that use case. But $$$
/waves from the murky depths of a StatusNet MySQL query
honestly i’m looking into an ipad for a similar use case

for whatever reason my kindle is as hard to read as paper is :/
I have the same issues as you do with the non-tablet alternatives, and find a tablet very comfortable and useful. I usually keep notes on a separate laptop. A friend has been enjoying the reMarkable 2 a lot - I'd buy one if I didn't already have all my use cases covered with what I already own
pre formatted full page pdfs are exactly why I prefer the iPad to the iPhone for this. Hardware manuals and college textbooks come to mind. They don’t reflow well.
Kindle Scribe and Remarkable have gotten good for PDFs. Agreed that smaller kindles suck for this.
I can vouch for remarkable but try and get one used. New was just too much. My second hand one was the perfect price point.
Sorry, I missed the poll. What about a #remarkble tablet?
https://remarkable.com/
I missed the poll, but I use a dedicated Galaxy Tab A from Samsung (<$300) with a stylus - no email or social installed - and the Xodo app syncs well with Dropbox, so edits are automatically synced. Game changer for me.
wait.
Huge difference in reading for enjoyment and reading for knowledge: you will want the ability to take notes.
Later, when you're compiling, you're going to want your notes available with the text.
I save pdfs to iBooks on my iPad and the formatting is like reading a book. Easily organized
very happy with my ipad pro and the Documents app by Readdle which also allows annotating and scribbling
I found the screen size of an iPad great for reading PDFs. The problem with any device that can do ~other things~ is that it's all too easy to get distracted. If you have strong willpower and don't get easily distracted, then fine.

My ideal reading device would be colour e-ink that can render PDFs to a high fidelity in both dark (with a backlight), in ambient indoor light (no backlight), and bright sunlight, and with NO distractions (a decent synced note taking app, perhaps).
The interesting part is the annotations. All my college textbooks are full of color markup and pencil annotations. And taped-on little stickies to make it easy to find important sections quickly. Theoretically computers could help with that incredibly well, but practically I have never seen software that does this well.
I bought a used Surface 7, replacing my old Surface 4. Really like reading PDFs on them for school using Zotero and DrawboardPDF.
@oivindberg is it light enough that you can hold it in bed or on a couch for the time needed to read 50-100 pages without your arm getting tired