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The PDF conversion is pretty mediocre for some things. It's not really a problem with the conversion service but rather with the PDF format itself.

I converted my PDF copy of Programming Clojure. It's mostly readable, but the code examples are not indented properly. Things like that are pretty much a show stopper for a programming book, but other books may work well enough. A fairly plain text document without many images or diagrams should work fine.

Not all PDF documents can be converted, though. If the document is a scan then you're out of luck. Text in images won't work either.

The bottom line is PDF is excellent for when you want a digital copy that will look the same as a print copy, but it is an absolutely terrible format for ebooks. The problem is the format and not the Kindle or the conversion service. Trying to use PDF on an ebook reader instead of one of the ebook formats is akin to littering the web with Word docs.




Thanks for the explanation.

It's a shame though.

As MP3's were to the iPod, free ebooks in PDF could be to the Kindle.

For example, Google Books has plenty of full content PDFs for out-of-copyright works.




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