A readable PDF converter for Kindle

Since about 5 years I use almost daily an e-book reader, - a kindle - one of the first version with the buttons at the bottom. I fall into the purchase of this new gadget when I realized that you could find "ways" to read e-book for free on it, and thanks to the give-away price amazon offered at the time ( less than 50 euros). I believe the e-book has been as revolutionary as the mp3 player was at its time, for the following reasons:

• the e-ink has no backlight and you can read almost as you would read a paper book, without hurting your eyes as with a tablet or a laptop computer.
• the battery duration (it last about one month)

The only (major) drawback, that limits the comparison with mp3, is that it is quite hard to convert a pdf (or any other format) into a nicely formatted version, easily readable on an ebook. There are plenty of services available online or on your desktop computer but most of them only works for 100% text books - no images, graphs, code or other things. Sadly, most of the books I read on my kindle are tech books, books that are fast-aging and most would become tree-cutting waste if I purchased paperback versions. These ebooks have plenty of formatted code on them, electronics diagrams, mathematic formulas and so on... neither of it displaying properly on the kindle... unless you are willing to "pay the price" and purchase the paid version of a digital good - which I seldom did since Napster times... (Wether this is good or bad or unavoidable is not the purpose of this article, people are still discussing on this matter and many ebooks have been written on this subject ;)

The solution: k2pdfopt

For some times I tried different methods and almost got used to read half garbage books, until last week, as I stumbled upon this software: As stated on their site, "K2pdfopt (Kindle 2 PDF Optimizer) is a stand-alone program which optimizes the format of PDF files for viewing on small (e.g. 6-inch) mobile reader and smartphone screens such as the Kindle's.

The output from k2pdfopt is a new (optimized) PDF file. K2pdfopt is meant for text-based files on a white background which may also have graphics or figures, and it works equally well on native and/or scanned or bitmapped PDF files." How to install for mac: http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/help/mac.shtml It works very well on complex formats ebooks and has the only drawback of providing heavier files (up to 40-50 megs).

Important note: you just have to transfer the generated PDF file on your kindle, do not convert it into Mobi or other format as it will loose its clean format. The pdf version is optimized to read on a kindle just as a kindle version. on the left, the kindle app converted pdf, and on the right side, the properly formatted version thanks to "k2pdfopt" software.

 

Other popular methods I used: sending to your kindle email with the word "convert" as the subject. send to kindle "official amazon app" on my notebook, various online conversion tools... "calibre conversion tool". But neither is working well for complex formatting options.