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Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know if Kindle supports reading normal (by which I mean without DRM or so) PDF files, even PDF files where each page is an image rather than text? Is it possible to put PDF files on it through USB as "mass storage device", or at least in some way that supports doing it from Linux through USB? Is it possible to do this without Kindle account?

Because, the hardware of the device looks nice to me, especially if you'd add a water proof cover around it.

Thanks!

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Yes it does but it's not great at displaying them. They don't scale brilliantly on the eInk screen so you tend to want to zoom and pan which is clunky to say the least.

From my perspective I'd look at an iPad or Android tablet for PDFs for this sort of thing - it's really not the Kindle's strong suit.

In terms of moving stuff over - yep, you can just mount it as a drive and copy stuff across, or use one of several readily available tools for managing content (I use Caliber on the Mac, not sure if it's available for Linux).

Yep, Calibre is available for Linux (I used it under Ubuntu 12.04, and now 12.10), and IMHO, is one of the more well-behaved cross-platform apps.

I bought a second hand Kindle DX to read PDF's. I installed Duokan on it, which a 3rd party OS that has much better PDF handling and allows dual booting with Kindle OS. It also supports epub format.

It is very easy to use Kindle without an Amazon account as there are all sorts of tools to allow you to do pretty much anything you want on your Kindle.

AFAIK you can install Duokan on every Kindle version.

Duokan looks great. I had never heard of it. Thanks!

Thanks for the tip. Explicit support for the DX is missing in the more recent releases. There seems to be some help here:

http://flip.netzbeben.de/2010/11/duokan-available-with-engli...

(via FAQ at http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=105847)

It does. PDF is not the best format though, as it has rigid formatting which makes it unpractical on a small screen. You can convert it to mobi with a program like Calibre though, which is much better (for text at least).

And I don't know if you can use your kindle at all without an Amazon account.

Others have pointed out that they don't scale well, but if you mail a plaintext PDF to a special email address associated with your kindle, they'll reformat it for the kindle and deliver it: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_p...

E-Ink Kindles can technically display PDFs, but in practical terms, you wouldn't want to read a PDF book on one. Unless the PDF dimensions are just perfect (and it rarely ever happens, maybe the DX is better?) or you generated the PDF yourself, a PDF's typical page margin gets rendered, generally cropping off the text on the bottom and/or right hand side of the page. This means that you have to pan the PDF page back to a near-center position every page turn. It's disruptive to your reading flow.

When reading PDFs on my Kindle, I change the orientation to landscape. It's not a perfect solution, as diagrams are sometimes broken in half, but it works well enough for me.

Set your Kindle to "fit to screen" and then in landscape mode, and it will make it palatable. I do this all the time.

That said, the pdf rendering could be easily improved a lot, and I've send numerous suggestions to Amazon for this. None of them have been implemented, sadly.

I love my Kindle DX because it's huge screen means PDF's read very nicely without cropping or pan and zoom.

You can view PDFs easily enough on a physical Kindle device, though as others have stated they don't scale that well.

You cannot operate a Kindle in conjunction with Amazon's ecosystem without having an Amazon account registered to an email address that you control. There may be ways to jailbreak a Kindle so as to enable you to (e.g.) transfer files via the USB cable without registering the device.

I own a Kindle Fire (not hd) and I downloaded a shit-ton of .mobi ebooks from ThePirateBay, I can read them just fine on the device.

Still, after this story broke I regret buying one. I hate companies that think they can remote control a device I purchased from them.

Yes, it does, and I use the Kindle all the time to read such PDF files.

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