I have tons of books on programming and many of them are accompanied by CD with the book in PDF format. A bright idea struck me – why carry around ton of bricks, when I can load electronic version onto my Kindle Fire? And it worked quite nicely, though a (very) little work required beforehand

First of all I got a better PDF reader app. Even though Kindle app supports PDF – it does very little besides page flipping. If a book has wide margins (most textbooks do) text looks really small, sometimes unreadable. ezPDF Reader on the other hands is highly customizable. Here’s what need to be done in order to make PDF a comfortable read on Kindle Fire:

1. In Settings: lock screen orientation to Landscape
2. In Settings: set page scrolling type to Vertical
3. While Reading: Using pinch-zoom adjust text to comfortable size
4. While Reading: Tap menu and select “Lock horizontal scroll bar”

The result is comfortably sized text with pages moved by a vertical scroll.

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UPDATE: New version of ezPDF makes reading even easier, you don’t even have to go thru steps described above. Version 1.7.2.0 adds “crop” feature – so you can crop those wide margins, making the text fill full screen. This way you can read PDF in a portrait mode, like God intended and more naturally “flip” the pages instead of scrolling. Here is a screenshot of what cropped PDF book looks like on Kindle Fire.

4 Responses to “How to comfortably read PDF books on Kindle Fire”

1. Duy says:

   02/19/2012 at 12:19 PM

   Does the ezPDF software lock the zoomed view to prevent the PDF from moving when attempting to scroll down the page? For example of what I am talking about is at :50 in this video.
   
2. Yuriy says:

   02/19/2012 at 6:28 PM

   Yes, using either “Lock horizontal scroll bar” or “crop” option (see description above) horizontal movement is restricted, so you can safely scroll vertically-only.
3. Barry says:

   03/12/2012 at 6:38 PM

   Thanks for the information. When I use the crop feature it does not seem to take up the whole available space as it does when I use the directions you first gave for landscape mode. This mode has text that takes up the whole screen area. The crop feature leaves some black space above and below the text. Is there something else to do to get the whole area full of text in the portrait mode? Thanks
4. Yuriy says:

   03/12/2012 at 8:18 PM

   @Barry, funny I never noticed that space before. I guess the proportions of the full rectangle with cropped text are different from screen rectangle. You can play around with crop size, trying to achieve compromise between text size and extra black space or accept it as a trade off of portrait mode.