Best way to read academic PDFs on an e-ink device?

April 21, 2015 1:58 PM

I would like to be able to read journal articles on my Nook ereader, but dislike the scrolling about required when looking at PDFs at a reasonable level of zoom. Is there a (semi-)automated toolchain for converting multi-column academic (humanities) PDFs to reflowable epub? Bonus points for preserving footnote links. I've tried Calibre conversion in the distant past, but didn't have much luck with multi-column documents; has this improved since then?
posted by Jakob to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

I converted multiple humanities journal PDFs to EPUB a few years ago and described my favoured technique in this answer. (There might have been some new tool breakthrough since then, of course.) I'm afraid footnote links didn't generally survive well.
posted by Busy Old Fool at 4:25 PM on April 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

k2pdfopt is ridiculously good with two-column science papers.
posted by tintexas at 5:12 PM on April 21, 2015 [3 favorites]

Seconding k2pdfopt.
posted by en forme de poire at 12:10 AM on April 22, 2015

If you ever decide to do an iPad I have been very pleased by the experience on the app LiquidText. Here is the video of the feature richness of the app. It has made reading PDFs and the general research flow much more interesting. If you are still enamoured with epub then Marvin is probably still the best epub reader but you will need to do workarounds using iTunes app sharing to bring over large collections since plugin development for Calibre and Marvin is in permanent hiatus.
posted by jadepearl at 9:32 PM on December 29, 2015