Kevin C. Wong

iOS PDF Apps

Apple Books app in Catalina uses iCloud to store PDFs, which I guess is fine for mostly text PDFs but anything with graphics, like comic books, you quickly eat through the 5 GB you get for free. Upgrading to 50 GB for $12 per year is one solution and I'd be able to keep sort of my current reading list available. But that means using Internet bandwidth to upload the files and download them to my iPad and I'm kind of tight on that. So it was off to look at third party iPad PDF readers...

Documents by Readdle [/] It's more designed to be a PDF editor. Shows PDFs in continuous 1-page scroll which I find inconvenient. Clumsy to add and access bookmarks. Clumsy to go to a page. Free with PDF editing a $50 add-on (and considering the editing UI elements are always present this app is not suitable as a PDF viewer-only).

Adobe Acrobat Reader for PDF [/] Not a bad PDF viewer, you can do single page or continuous page and accessing go-to-page and bookmarks is easy. But you can't create bookmarks, a feature in Android.

Kybook 3 Ebook Reader (2019) [+] Third time's the charm. Reader view without a bunch of always-present editing controls like the above two have. Supports 2-page spreads in landscape. You can add bookmarks with a tap (and actually it does have control buttons but they're very tiny which keeps them out of the way but hard to tap). Has a bunch of organizing and other features some of which use the subscription ($15 per year).

So for now I'll use Kybook 3. Apple Books is still my preferred reader on iPad -- Apple is great at UI and feel even if their apps don't have every feature (but then again leaving out unnecessary features is part of great UI). I think once I get Sonic fiber Internet I'll upgrade my iCloud and go back to Apple Books.

------------------

Wed Jul 15 - Annoyingly Kybook 3 does not do 2-page spreads correctly. A PDF is like a book so page 1 is the cover and pages 2-3 are the first 2-page spread. Kybook 3 does not know that and when I'm reading a comic book with lots of 2-page spreads they are displayed incorrectly and it's amazingly annoying. I also found that I had epub versions of some of the PDFs and epub are significantly smaller (I think they made a mistake and put really high-res images in the PDF version).

So I'm going back to Apple Books and if I keep it to 1 GB at at time that's a fair amount of comics book material. Apple Books is still useless as your books storage and organizer since it's dependent in iCloud, but I guess Apple Books is not that great at organizing in any case so storing a thousand books would be a nightmare of using Apple Books limited organization capabilities.