this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2025
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If an 8-inch screen is enough for you, then I recommend either the Pocketbook Inkpad 4, or the Pocketbook Color 3 if you want color. They run Linux and have a very capable PDF Reader (especially compared to Kindles)
If you want an even bigger screen then sadly they start to get very expensive, and usually ship with an already outdated version of Android and an underpowered SOC. And they also have the terrible standby battery life you would expect from an Android device
I guess the size is good to me for reading. I guess the kindle and kobo I used to have were even smaller than that. For reading books that's quite good to me and I never felt I needed something larger.
However, when I tried to read PDFs I had lots of problems. The readers either would show the full A4 page in the screen, which would make it unreadable, or show just a piece of the page and it would then be difficult to pan. I remember I had tried using some tools which would break up the PDF pages into pages which would be visualizable in such a screen, but that did not work too well especially when reading articles with two column layouts.
Ideally articles would be available as ePub, but that's quite rare. The main point would be: if I get one such tool to read articles I can dedicate it to just that. But, I need it to be easy for such purpose: I don't want to be panning up and down a page all the time. I don't know whether that is possible and how that could work however, because indeed resizing is not one of the objectives of PDF.
I've had luck with web2epub on Firefox. Web articles become epubs which work well with eink readers. PDF is such a storage format cause its many formats under a trench coat. If you find a good solution for those let me know. Even calibre isn't perfect.