Hey guys, I am currently in the second semester of my CS degree and our professor supply lots of reading material as .pdfs.<p>Now I have noticed that reading those on my iPad causes extreme eyestrain after a while so I would like to switch to an E Ink E-Reader. I found a ton of them online after a google search but I am a bit lost if any of the cheap devices are actually serviceable so I figured I would post an Ask HN :)<p>Thanks a lot for any help in advance!
You may find that "budget" and "acceptable for PDFs" don't often ride the same train.<p>Most small e-readers are _much_ slower to render PDFs at all, to start with. On a small e-ink screen, you'll find the speed of the page refresh gets annoying as you try to pan around the document. Larger-format readers (10"+) tend to be on-par with tablets in terms of price, and offer fewer features beyond better battery life.<p>That said, for regular reading, I'm fond enough of the Kobo Clara 2E that I bought one for everyone in the household last year. If you're handy (hacky?), you can use them without creating an account with Kobo. And you can put any non-DRM book you like on it just by connecting it to a computer and dragging and dropping it over. (No need to mess with Calibre.)<p>My own personal experience with reading and eyestrain suggest that the media itself may not be your issue. If it was a contrast or brightness issue, there tools built into the iPad to fit the display to your comfort level. Consider a visit to an optometrist. My wife is far-sighted and has no problems reading computer screens and anything else a couple feet away, but got terrible eyestrain while reading books until she got glasses.
The biggest issue with an e-reader is finding one that can handle PDFs at a reasonable analog to the size of the printed page the PDF is based on.<p>If however you're able to covert the PDFs easily to a format like ePub (using Calibre which is open source) and the resulting file is reasonably easy to read on your iPad, then a cheap Kindle will do the job. ($99 new, you can find used or refurbished ones for $60-80)