I have a 70GB library of textbooks and technical journal articles in (mostly) PDF format. I have been pleasantly surprised by the utility real-time full-text search provides for such a library – instead of browsing, I tend to access it the same way I access the web: by googling for phrases.

Unfortunately, I dislike reading PDFs on my computer screen – I would like to access the library on a smaller, more portable, preferably e-ink device. I have a kindle 1 and an OLPC, both of which have the smaller form factor and tablet mode that I like. Unfortunately, the kindle 1 does not support PDF and my attempts at converting journal articles and textbooks have been unsatisfactory and unreliable at best.

OLPC vs. Kindle 1

I would love to use the kindle, since it can provide ~8000 pages on a single 3-hour battery, is very light, and has a great screen, but I would be limited to whatever I could fit on an SD card (SDHC is unreliable but may work), and if I had converted the PDFs into images, I would lose the ability to search the content.

The OLPC seems more promising. It’s not light enough to comfortably hold for long periods of time, but I usually can find a way to prop it up on a knee or table. The battery only lasts 4 hours or so on a full charge, but it can natively display PDFs in tablet mode and has a remarkable screen that approaches e-ink in clarity (although not viewing angle). It can run debian & gnome, and I feel like there has got to be a good application out there for that environment built for managing large document collections and searching across them. It has like 2GB of built-in flash memory for the OS and an SDHC slot.

I’ve taken some photos comparing the screens of the OLPC natively showing a PDF and of the Kindle 1 showing a .prc file of the same PDF converted with PDFRead.

Basically, I want iTunes for PDFs on Linux. With fast full-text search.

Oh, I have my eye on the Kindle DX and the FoxIt eSlick e-ink readers. Both can display PDFs natively.

Here’s a short screencast I made demonstrating how I like interact with my pdf library.

(Download the source of this video from vimeo for more detail – it’s only 60 megs and is 1280×720)