Hello there.
I was wondering if there was any plans of, or interest in, having Amazon convert the tasty tasty Pathfinder books to the kindle? Or indeed if this has been done and they're just hiding in some obscure location?
See I really like my books and they see great use at the home gaming table, but dragging them all along for game night is a broken spine waiting to happen ;) So in short: I would loooove to be able to get them for my Kindle.
Why the Kindle? You may ask. Well. I really have no use for all the additional glitter of the Ipad, or it's copy brethern and besides it handles PDFs slower than my first computer handled 8 bit graphics - Beware, I'm an old man, I know slow when I see it ;) But the Kindle is simple, elegant and so very easy to use, problem is that it handles PDFs almost worse than the Ipad.
And thus I find myself asking: Can it be? Will it be? And should it be?
(The correct answer to all of the above should of course be: "Yes we can" ;)
Thank you :)
|
It will be interesting to see if you get an official response, but in case you don't, we've been asking for some variant of this (Kindle books, "light" PDFs), for quite some time now and generally the response is, "we want our PDFs to accurately reflect the quality of presentation of our physical books," in other words, "no."
A little searching should turn up a multitude of threads on this same topic.
Again, this is what's been relayed to us in the past, if opinions at Paizo have changed, we've yet to hear about it, but would certainly welcome it.
Hmm. The point about the electronic versions mirroring the quality of the books are quite valid indeed. It just dies quite throughly when every platform out there (barring a laptop of course) handles them like a small elderly woman would handle changing her tyre, which I hear is a quite slow and very cumbersome process.
The PDFs are all fine and good for using laptops, but in cases of laptops being banned at the table, or as in my case, not wanting the distraction of it in front of me, the PDFs are no longer quality, they're a burden, sadly :(
Ah well. I just have to wait for someone to make a Kindle converter if the bosses dislike the idea so much :)
I'd love to see the Pathfinder fiction on Kindle (no really, I love my Kindle.)
I'm curious, how do the PF PDF's look on an iPad?
A friend of mine has one, so I can tell you that they look awesome ;) They take almost longer to load on the Ipad than on the Kindle though, so usually he has the PDF open on the page he's sure to use during the session ... :(
I would probably just use the web browser to go to the SRD
One thing to note is that Kindles were designed to handle books which are mostly or entirely type. Heavy graphics laden material though will bring them to their knees, begging for mercy.
Yeah, no. Kindle and other eReaders are where newspapers and magazines are going - you know, media with traditionally alot of pictures.
|
|
I'd love to see the Pathfinder fiction on Kindle (no really, I love my Kindle.)
I'm curious, how do the PF PDF's look on an iPad?
Pathfinder Fiction is available as an ePub, which you should be able to load into your Kindle.
As for how do they look? I don't have an iPad, but I do have an Android tablet. They look great, and are very readable...once the page loads. The thing to remember about the various tablets out there right now is that they have processors that are quite literally the equivalent of that in a 10 year old computer. Imagine opening up some of our modern PDFs on something that old. Sure they'll display, but you'll only get older while it's processing the request.
|
|
One thing to note is that Kindles were designed to handle books which are mostly or entirely type. Heavy graphics laden material though will bring them to their knees, begging for mercy.Yeah, no. Kindle and other eReaders are where newspapers and magazines are going - you know, media with traditionally alot of pictures.
As an owner of both a Kindle and a Nook Color (rooted) this is not the case.
The Kindle is a black and white reader with e-ink. Traditional media like magazines looks like crap on e-ink displays (just open up any book with images in it or a webpage and compare it to an iPad or even the Nook Color). It also has to redraw after every page, which is time-consuming on an already slow device. Basically, although it's easy to read books on, it does a horrible job with anything color.
On the other hand, the color models (such as the Nook Color or iPad) display magazines quite well, although they're horrible slow. You can't read them in bright or direct light, the battery life isn't nearly up to that of the e-ink displays, and reading lots of text hurts ones eyes.
So while the intent may be for magazines to switch to these media, they are far from effective and they do in fact "bring these devices to their knees begging for mercy."
I use Goodreader on my ipad, and it gets faster rendering with every upgrade. Right now it is about a 2-3 second delay on the core book when turning pages. I can live with that. Smaller documents are quicker.
|
|
I use Goodreader on my ipad, and it gets faster rendering with every upgrade. Right now it is about a 2-3 second delay on the core book when turning pages. I can live with that. Smaller documents are quicker.
I use ezPDF on the Android platform, and once it gets its queue going, you're looking at a zero second delay between pages. Of course, it takes a good 2-4 seconds to get itself a page queued, so flipping through the book isn't going to work very well.
The real problem with PDFs on these readers isn't about reading them. In fact, reading a PDF from start to finish is pretty straightforward and generally runs pretty fast (again on ezPDF) because it has the pages queued. The problem is when you're looking for a specific point in the book. The search function is horrifically slow on large documents (I tried searching for a rule in the SR4 core rulebook and it took 15 minutes) because the processor just takes so long to go through that much material, and flipping back and forth between pages doesn't let the queuing function do its job, which means that a lot of time is still waiting for page loads.
Sure in a couple of years we could be looking at something more reasonable, but I don't consider even a 2 second render time between pages to be reasonable when I'm trying to look something specific up.
Chief Technical Officer
|
We have a FAQ Entry for this.
Do you have plans to make Pathfinder products for the iPad, Kindle or other portable devices?
...the most common eBook formats were designed for text-heavy books that don't rely heavily on illustrations, and that means those formats just don't work very well with books that have strong graphic elements—like all of our Pathfinder gaming products. For these books, the PDF format remains unmatched, so the best way to view our gaming books on your portable device is to find a good PDF viewer for your device, and purchase our PDFs.
Our Pathfinder Tales fiction line, though, works very well as an eBook; Pathfinder Tales are being released in both ePub and PDF formats.
We have a FAQ Entry for this.
Do you have plans to make Pathfinder products for the iPad, Kindle or other portable devices?
...the most common eBook formats were designed for text-heavy books that don't rely heavily on illustrations, and that means those formats just don't work very well with books that have strong graphic elements—like all of our Pathfinder gaming products. For these books, the PDF format remains unmatched, so the best way to view our gaming books on your portable device is to find a good PDF viewer for your device, and purchase our PDFs.
Our Pathfinder Tales fiction line, though, works very well as an eBook; Pathfinder Tales are being released in both ePub and PDF formats.
A straight answer! Thank you Vic :)
Though it saddens me a little I guess I can cope ;) So how are those Pathfinder novels? Better than the Collected Horrors of Drizzt I hope? x)
|
There is some respite for iPad owners in that you can use goodreader which dramatically improves the PDF reading experience. It loads them a little faster, but it also does some look ahead caching, so while your reading page X it is already loading X+1 and X-1. Its still sub ideal for the jump around kind of referencing we folks tend to need, but it is progress.