>The biggest disappointment with my e-reader is that reading PDFs is awful on that ridiculous display.
Ereaders suck for PDFs. To some extent, that's because the PDF format sucks. PDF forces a number of words per line, lines per page, etc. Essentially, PDFs force a certain page size on you. If you compare with physical books, that's not the case. When Stephen King writes a novel, it can be printed as a small paperback or a large print book.
Epubs is the way to go with ereaders.
As for the size of ereaders, it's a tradeoff. 6 inches has its shortcomings (frequent page turns), but they have their pluses (very easy to carry).
Sony used to make 9" readers, and I occasionally find used ones for very cheap at Goodwill (under $10).
The Kobo Auro One is almost 8" (about $250).
But yeah, if you want to read PDFs, ebook readers are not the way to go. Use a tablet instead (with all its screen fatigue, etc).
>Essentially, PDFs force a certain page size on you. ...
Not necessarily. Sony's early readers had automatic reflowing of text if you chose a larger font size. It worked really well for fiction or any other type of text without pictures/diagrams.
For modern e-readers, converters like the free Calibre software (https://calibre-ebook.com), will allow resizing & reflow of text in PDFs to a size more usable for any device.
>Sony used to make 9" readers ...
There are refurbished Sony PRS-900 units available (e.g. eBay) for around $50 and, unlike most e-readers, they have user-replaceable batteries.
>Not necessarily. Sony's early readers had automatic reflowing of text if you chose a larger font size. It worked really well for fiction or any other type of text without pictures/diagrams.
My first ereader was Sony's PRS-350. It had automatic reflowing, but it did a poor job on many PDF's. It did not take care of line breaks - so if I increased the font size, each line was 1.5 lines long (i.e. the original PDF's line would be 1.5 lines on the ereader - it would still respect the line break).
I haven't tried the conversions in recent versions of Calibre. I did try it for PDFs over 5 years ago, and the results were less than satisfactory. I pretty much decided not to use small ereaders for PDFs.
If you're like me, you've spent many times that on books. E-readers often have books at a discount or even free. So its a value proposition: how many e-books over what time make it a bargain?
Well, not until someone proposes a 10-11" e-reader that doesn't cost half my salary.
The biggest disappointment with my e-reader is that reading PDFs is awful on that ridiculous display.
We might have nice, readable fonts and pictures, with zoom too, and instead...