Mongoose PDFs to Kindle

[apastuszak]

Here in the US, we have a huge sale day known as Black Friday. Well that has kind of warped into all sorts of deals throughout the month of November.

The Amazon Kindle Scribe, an eBook reader with a 10.2 inch screen was $100 off. So, I picked one up.

It reads PDFs and will let you annotate them.

Which is great. But the PDF renderer is SLOW. Painfully slow at times.

Luckily, I found a procedure online that allows me to convert a PDF to Fixed Layout KFX format.

The rendering and page turn times of a KFX file is a LOT faster than a PDF file on Kindle devices.

It would be nice if Mongoose could provide a KFX download option for use on Kindles.

 

[AndrewW]

Calibre (free) can convert between most formats:

https://calibre-ebook.com/

 

[Anstett]

Most if not all of the Traveller Fiction that Mongoose sells is already in a Kindle format currently.

Full agree that having the Scribe to read all the books on is great.

 

[apastuszak]

Well, I'm playing with this now. PDFs are definitely a second-class citizen on the Kindle Scribe. And converting the PDF to Amazon's native KFX format only partly solves the problem. The Kindle takes longer than it should to render pages with graphics on them. The more complicated the PDF, the worse it is. The Core Rulebook PDF converted to KFX takes anywhere from between instantaneous to 5 seconds to turn a page, depending on how many images are on the page.

The worst for me so far is the Savage Worlds PDF. That can take as long as 15 seconds to do a page turn.

I'm experimenting now with converting to a PDF to greyscale and see if that speeds up page rendering times.