Tips on managing your ebook library

If you’re like me you probably have a large library of ebooks that you’ve gathered over time.

There are many formats out there but the one that I find most prevalent is PDF.

Compress your PDF library to save space

Depending on how the book was digitised, the size of the file can wary from small to reasonable to super large. Usually ebooks that were designed as digital books by the publisher are quite small in size.

But there’s another range of books which were scanned into PDF format and were made searchable afterwards by means of an OCR process. These are typically quite large.

To make sure your ebook collection occupies as little space as possible I recommend compressing your PDF documents in order to reduce their size.

This process can convert a 100Mb file into a tiny 4Mb PDF document, saving a lot of precious space on your Dropbox or Google Drive accounts.

Optimising for the Kindle

PDF docs are a pain to read on the Kindle. 

The problem comes from the fact that the PDF format was not designed for reading on a small device like a Kindle or Nook. Text doesn’t flow well and won’t wrap based on the size of the screen. Scrolling horizontally is a mess.

Th solution is to convert the PDF documents to a format that is more Kindle friendly. And there are many of these formats: DOC, HTML, EPUB.

What works best for me is to convert PDF to DOC and then send this Word file to my Kindle. Voila, problem solved!