Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsAllows me to read Open Library PDF book scans on my Kindle Fire HD
Reviewed in the United States on November 4, 2014
This 5-star review covers a single solution to a single problem, which Foxit MobilePDF solved for me. The problem was my Kindle Fire HD’s inability to read PDF scans of old books that had been downloaded from Open Library (dot org).
My tablet hadn’t had any problems reading PDFs in the past, but with these scans, dozens of random letters had disappeared from every page of every book (even though they looked good when viewed through Adobe on my PC). I checked online and found I wasn’t the only one experiencing this problem. A suggestion on one of the boards was to install a specific PDF reader that cost about five dollars.
I decided to try the free PDF readers first, and Foxit MobilePDF was my fifth attempt. The first four either did not read PDFs without purchasing an upgrade; did not read the Open Library PDF scans any better than my Kindle Fire HD’s default program; or, in one case, read the documents flawlessly but took between 45 and 60 seconds to turn each page. The slow page turns can be a real problem. For example, Crime and Punishment begins on page 33 of the PDF, which, at 45 seconds per page, comes to about 25 minutes of work before you can begin reading the first page.
This free version of Foxit MobilePDF accomplishes both tasks: it reproduces each page as clearly as if I were viewing it on my PC, and it allows pages to be turned relatively quickly.
Returning to the above example, Crime and Punishment, I was able to use Foxit MobilePDF’s thumbnail view to get to the first page of the novel. It still took a few minutes for all those thumbnail images to load, but it was a one-time wait because the next time I returned to Crime and Punishment, the app returned me to the last page I was on when I closed the book.
The first time you open Foxit MobilePDF, you’ll have to browse through your Kindle’s directories to find the PDFs in your Documents folder. But when you back out of a document, you’re backing into that folder, with your list of documents. If you close the app while still in the Documents folder, you’ll re-open into the Documents folder.
I’m able to keep all my PDFs off the carousel, and access them through this app. Opening the app defaults to the list of PDFs, and the app remembers the most recent page of each document. The delays in page turns are not at all unreasonable, and it reads Open Library PDF scans perfectly.
