I'm reading a PDF book

I posted a couple of days ago about my difficulties in reading PDF files on the Nokia N810. I also started a thread on the maemo-users list, which you can read here.

The upshot is that I discovered that although the interface is quite misguided in a number of ways, if you pull your stylus out and fiddle with it enough, you can in fact read a PDF.

I still think it's odd that a program that's called a "reader" doesn't present the user with one button that always moves to the next text to read. The way I actually have to read is to stroke the stylus up and left to move the page around on a screen, and then tap an invisible button on the right side of the screen to move to the next page.

If they wanted to call it a "viewer" and not a "reader", I could understand this interface -- it actually does let you go to any part of the PDF file and view it at a wide variety of sizes. But to me "reading" means going continuously through the text, and this "reader" just doesn't seem to be designed for that.

Another interesting point about that thread is that at least two of the four people who participated (I'm one of them) were interested in the problem because we were trying to read the packet of Hugo award nominees which you can get by going to the Anticipation website and joining. Without joining, you can read or download (but not vote on) a large number of the nominees from the Hugos page on the anticipation site.

Although you would expect Hugo nominated Science Fiction writers and publishers to be more interested in how to implement mobile technologies than the average publisher or writer, a large fraction of the material is provided as PDF's formated for the printed page. No matter how good the interface design on the PDF reader, a reflowable format is always going to be more flexible for being read by a wide variety of people on a wide variety of devices.

If you're interested, the book I'm reading is Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi.

Related posts:

1. Reading PDF's on the N810
2. Reading PDF files on a portable device
3. Converting PDF files