How do the rulebooks look on a Kindle?

[Redblade8]

Hey folks,

Pretty much the subject line. I might be picking up a Kindle soon. I used to have one years ago, and I used to use it to read PDFs. I assume that's still a thing, and if so, how do the various Pathfinder books do on it? Are they readable?

Thanks.

Redblade

[graystone]

PDF's look fine on one: I have all of my PF2 books on one when I want to use them on the go.

[Ravingdork]

When I tried this several years ago, they didn't look great on account of the Kindle limitations at the time, but they were certainly legible.

[OrochiFuror]

Only place I read my books AKA PDF's is with my Fire 10, works for me.

[graystone]

OrochiFuror wrote:

Only place I read my books AKA PDF's is with my Fire 10, works for me.

Ah after seeing this, I see I didn't mention what kindle I was using, an old [9th gen] version fire 7. If mine can run PDF's well, a more modern one should.

[Ravingdork]

graystone wrote:

OrochiFuror wrote:

Only place I read my books AKA PDF's is with my Fire 10, works for me.

Ah after seeing this, I see I didn't mention what kindle I was using, an old [9th gen] version fire 7. If mine can run PDF's well, a more modern one should.

*Rummages through a bunch of boxes before pulling out a dusty old black slate.*

It appears that I had the 7th generation Kindle.

[Redblade8]

I was considering one of the B&W e-ink ones, not the Kindle Fire, if that matters.

[graystone]

Redblade8 wrote:

I was considering one of the B&W e-ink ones, not the Kindle Fire, if that matters.

the only difference will be the obvious; your pdf will be in B&W on a paper kindle. You'll have to figure out if that's an issue for yourself as I haven't looked at a pathfinder pdf in B&W to say if it'd be a problem.

[Ravingdork]

Redblade8 wrote:

I was considering one of the B&W e-ink ones, not the Kindle Fire, if that matters.

My 7th generation Kindle was like that.

It was a little slow to load, and I wouldn't recommend it if you're an artwork buff. But if you're only concerned with looking up rules, then it is perfectly legible/serviceable. They don't read well in the dark though, if they're still anything like mine was.

I'm sure the newer models are faster now and might have a backlight. A true tablet might give you more buttons and navigation options though.

My antique only had one button and limited touch screen capability. Having dusted it off and recharged it, it still works great, but I don't recall how to exit one book to enter another without restarting the whole thing. XD

[TSandman]

e-ink still suck at PDFs. I got the latest color Kobo: it's nice, but navigating PDF is a pain because of the screen size combined with the e-ink refresh, it's slow when zooming and moving around.

It's Superb to read on if you don't do that though (ex: having a static table displayed for reference)

IIRC, Kindle is supposed to have color one out "real soon now", not sure as I'm not in tha ecosystem.

[Conscious Meat]

My 2021-vintage Kindle Paperwhite (sig. ed, not that it matters much) seems to handle the Player Core reasonably enough, although it's not snappy.

It suffers, however, on the more art-intensive Monster Core, at least when attempting to zoom into part of a page. If you play other TTRPGs, be warned that some may significantly heavier PDFs (e.g. Chaosium's CoC 7E; the CoC 7E Keeper's Rulebook has roughly the same page count as the PF2e Player Core, but the PDF is almost 4x the size, and Chaosium doesn't offer single-chapter versions).