Nook eBook Reader and PDF Documents

Written by Scott Herold

Monday, 14 December 2009 17:47

I was one of the first to jump on the nook bandwagon when Barnes and Noble announced it. It arrived last week while I was in Europe so didn't get a chance to really start playing with it until yesterday. One of the first things that people started to ask me was "How is the PDF performance". I had a chance to load up the only "real" PDF eBook I have... The VI3: Advanced Technical Design Guide. I figured this was a good test for several reasons.

I wrote it, so I know it's formatting and layout inside and out
It is big. Weighing in at 814 some odd pages let's me judge performance
It has a lot of images splattered throughout the book

Copying it to the nook from my Mac was as simple as connecting it, and dropping it onto the "My Documents" folder on the nook's internal memory. I've read reports on the internet that you cannot use external memory for PDFs since the nook itself locks the location to the "My Documents" folder. Hopefully a 1.1 firmware option allows you to specify any folder on internal or external memory.

Overall I am very impressed. It took about 5 seconds to format the 11 MB document and display it on the screen. Page turns take between 1 and 2 seconds, which is not a big deal to me. Overall the nook does a fantastic job of splitting pages of text. It does keep the PDF pagination in place. The nook keeps the current and total page count in the upper-right hand corner. If I am on a page of the PDF that gets split into two nook pages, the page count i the corner stays the same until it hits the next PDF page. This is great for TOC/Index purposes. If I set the font to "Small", it keeps a very clean 1:1 page mapping of PDF to nook, but it is TOUGH to read. The default of "Medium" looks great and is highly readable.

Images formatted extremely well. We do have some issues that are actually native to how the PDF was compiled for the printer. We have some images that were properly saved to the source document as flat PNG files, and we have other image files that were saved as layered images (Source Visio). These layered images get messed up by the Adobe compiler, and you can see the results on a few of the images in the print book. Can't fault the nook for our mistakes.

I've attached the following images that I snapped to give people a good idea of what PDF support looks like. As I flip through (100 pages in so far), I haven't come across any issues that makes me say "Holy crap, the nook sucks", and in fact feel the exact opposite. The nook is damn impressive for what it is...an eBook reader. Too many reviews on the net are trying to review the nook as the second coming of Christ, which means Barnes and Noble marketing did almost too good of a job (Bravo!)

If I can just convince all the virtualization authors out there to do a PDF exchange with me, I'd be a happy man (Looking at you Hal). Click for larger images below...and I'm sorry for the high ISO/grainy quality. The lighting in my office sucks and the flash just didn't look right bouncing off the touch screen display.

If anyone wants to check out and compare the eBook on a Kindle or Sony, I've attached the full book PDF at the bottom of this article (I've already given the whole thing away for free with individual chapters anyway). Enjoy!