Fair point that the Kindle is too small to read PDFs which are designed to accurately represent a full sheet of paper. May I then suggest a tenth way to improve the Kindle: Make a version with a screen large enough to view a standard sheet of paper. It is not just students and teachers who would be interested. You would tap into the non-price sensitive, expense account armed bankers and lawyers. Trust me, this group buys a lot of books…

Why can’t Amazon Kindles display PDFs in Native mode?

Unfortunately, PDFs and the Kindle format are inherently incompatible, so what this question really asks for is a quick and easy way to decode the PDF format and translate the information into a variety of XML/HTML.

Adobe would probably object, since along the way one would have to break Adobe’s proprietary security schemes aimed at preventlng that very activity. To their so-so credit, Amazon does try to do this during their translation process, with mostly bad results, precisely as Adobe intended.

Adobe PDFs are designed to display *exactly* what the designer of a paper or book wants each and every page to look like, and are mostly set at the “standard” paper sizes for a given region, which generally use too much screen real estate to be readily accessible on a Kindle without some mechanism for scrolling the page up and down and from side to side, all of which “windowing” schemes are a pain in the neck to actually read. So PDFs on Kindle would be *either* too small to read with any facility or too awkward to use without the occasional urge to hurl it against the wall. Precisely as Adobe intended.

XML/HTML, on the other hand, is designed to display content very flexibly on multiple devices at multiple resolutions, which is exactly what a device with the ability to resize text on the fly requires.

Apples and oranges.

The people to complain about are Adobe, and it’s important to remember that PDFs are really a Digital Rights Management scheme designed to frustrate people who wish to capture text and use it in other ways, so flexibility and adaptability was never a design feature.

http://www.tuaw.com/2007/11/26/save-on-ipods-or-mac-gear-20-cash-back-from-paypal-for-some-si/