eReader Recommendations

[Batman]

I'm looking for an E Reader.

Needs to have expandable SD Slot for up to 32 GB

B&W Screen the same size as (or larger) kindle

long battery life

the native ability to read PDF

rechargeable battery

usb connectivity for loading personally made or online purchased content.

reasonably priced (under $200.00)

also would like some pointers on how to efficiently scan and pdf my tech manuals, and other radio related books to keep stored on this ereader.

[bezking]

I would say that except for the SD card the Kindle meets all of your requirements.

Do you really need 32gb?

[Batman]

when i scan to pdf and load all my low power broadcasting tech manuals probably will come close to it. for some odd reason when you scan a book to pdf instead of a publisher directly converting it from his digital files to pdf the file comes out somewhat larger. sometimes 2-3 times.

i'm also looking for pointers on how to properly scan the books so they come out with good resolution/readability while keeping the file sizes down.

i use adobe 6 and a canon canoscan 630u flatbed scanner.

[resqguy911]

when i scan to pdf and load all my low power broadcasting tech manuals probably will come close to it. for some odd reason when you scan a book to pdf instead of a publisher directly converting it from his digital files to pdf the file comes out somewhat larger. sometimes 2-3 times.

i'm also looking for pointers on how to properly scan the books so they come out with good resolution/readability while keeping the file sizes down.

i use adobe 6 and a canon canoscan 630u flatbed scanner.

I think the problem is you are scanning to an image embedded in a pdf instead of converting to text. Unfortunately I am not an adobe expert, but since acrobat is at version ten now- that might have a feature to clean up the size?

[Wowbagger]

I think the problem is you are scanning to an image embedded in a pdf instead of converting to text. Unfortunately I am not an adobe expert, but since acrobat is at version ten now- that might have a feature to clean up the size?

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is still very hit or miss - trying to convert an image back to letters is fraught with errors. Good OCR will get about 85% right, great OCR will get about 95% right, but you still have to manually clean things up. And if you are dealing with diagrams and illustrations, as tech manuals tend to do, you will still have very large images to deal with.

When you create a PDF from the original document, you don't have those issues - letters are letters, and line art, if done in a vector illustration program, remains lines, not pixels. But if the OP is scanning, he won't have that.

I'd ask "why the constraint of black and white?" - if you remove that, you can get a Pandigital Novel pretty cheap, and they take full size SD cards, so you can go to 32G right now, with larger on the way. AND you get a full Android device (albeit a slow one) with a decent browser and media capability.

[Batman]

someone told me color effects battery life

[Wowbagger]

That is sort of true, but:

The issue is whether you have a backlight or not. Color pretty much requires a backlight. Black and white really only helps if you get an e-Ink display that does not require a backlight but can be viewed with ambient light. That is the type of display a Kindle has, but many other readers don't have the e-Ink display.