So, who bought the official case then? And who bought the one with the light in it?

I’ve got one, it looks smart, seems well made, and the light is excellent. Full marks to whoever worked out how to power it from the main battery, too – charge the kindle and your light will work.

If reading PDFs is important get the bigger Kindle, the normal one is crap for it. A guy at work has one for studying and it’s excellent, I’ve tried using my (normal) one and it’s awful, you have to rotate the screen to get it to fit in, the text it too small, etc. OK for an emergency, but that’s it.

Isn’t there a way of converting PDFs to other eBook formats? I seem to remember seeing something.

On the Mac I use software called calibre to convert. Works great.

There is only one size of Kindle available in the UK, the Kindle DX which is much bigger has to be shipped from Amazon in the States i think.

PDF’s can be read on a Kindle but you can easily convert them to a more suitable format (.PRC which gives adjustable text size etc) by using Amber Lit Converter (which is free).

Thanks for clarification about PDFs. I have a lot of technical manuals in PDF, with many colour large format diagrams.

I could live without the colour, but if conversion strips out the diagrams then it’s not suitable.

If zooming/panning i the native PDF viewer is also a bit duff then maybe that’s not suitable either. The DX model sounds better

I may get a tablet then [£££ and worse battery life]. Is PDF viewing in tablets substantially better?

On the Mac I use software called calibre to convert. Works great.

‘s the same software on Windows too.

Has anyone tried downloading the contents of a website and converting to some Kindle format?

I just read this, which might save the day:

I processed using the PDF2LRF -> PNG2PDF -> Mobi Creator is the best in that it replicates the look of the original PDF (image based) and more importantly, it bypasses having to attach/ email to Amazon, wait 1 hour, transfer back, which is bad for large files > 20 megs. With PDF2LRF, everything including text/borders etc… is optimized to be more readable on ebook readers then default because the program increases the contrast for text.

mol – see http://www.instapaper.com

still need a connection though, so it may not be what you’re after

sorry, I was probably misleading you – the conversion doesn’t strip out the images, what I meant was that it identifies the text and pulls it out of the fixed PDF format. The images are still there.

If you really need technical diagrams I’d go for GoodReader on an iPad – that kind of thing is not the Kindle’s strong suit, but the iPad is great for it.

I tried instapaper – only does one page, it seems. I’d like something that would navigate all the links and download that too.

If you really need technical diagrams I’d go for GoodReader on an iPad – that kind of thing is not the Kindle’s strong suit, but the iPad is great for it.

I’d say it’s great on the Kindle DX, as an ex-pat I’m forced to use the Amazon.com store, I didn’t realise it isn’t on Amazon.co.uk.

at the risk of adding my worthless tuppence, i too have one and it is wifi only. i have transferred more onto it by usb cable than by wifi, even still.