I got my Kindle Touch Wi-Fi with special offers last week. More info on this nice device at the Amazon Kindle Touch page, the Kindle Wikipedia article page, and of course Google searches will do you lots of good.
Granted I’m busy so I’ve not been able to maximize its use yet but I’ve been able to play with it and organize my books and personal documents already. Overall I like the look and feel and functionality of the Kindle Touch (or KT) and I believe you can search reviews with Google, including this good Kindle Touch review by CNET. For reading novels in the native formats accepted by Kindle (e.g. .mobi, .azw files) the pinch-and-zoom as well as the swipe (or just tap) to go to the next/previous page, among other features of KT, are great.
As a researcher though I have lots of PDFs to read, many of which have text formatted in mathematical notation (such as those made using LaTeX). Of course KT can handle PDFs, and even though you could pinch-and-zoom as well as swipe to pan through a page or through pages, reading a PDF file this way can be really cumbersome especially since the default orientation of viewing in KT is portrait mode. It would be nice if we can rotate the KT to landscape orientation to better read PDF files. However, according to an official statement from a Kindle Customer Support representative, landscape mode is not available on KT. Bummer. I immediately emailed Amazon at kindle-feedback@amazon.com (all of you should! 
) asking for future software/firmware update to automatically change orientation in KT, and when might this be.
Right now, a sort of “hack” is possible to allow Ubuntu (and other GNU/Linux distros) users like myself to read our PDF books and files in landscape mode in the KT. An answer is to use the pdftk commandline tool which I made a post about some time ago. You can also refer to the man page of your GNU/Linux distribution after installing pdftk. In Ubuntu, a simple and quick apt-get or Synaptic installation should do the installation job for you (check my post about pdftk above, or search this blog). The “hack” goes like so:
Say you have a PDF file named mydoc.pdf. To rotate the entire PDF file (assuming it is in portrait orientation by default) 90 degrees counterclockwise (so now the mydoc.pdf is now in landscape orientation) fire up a terminal and type:
$ pdftk mydoc.pdf cat 1-endW output tmp.pdf
Where tmp.pdf is the desired output filename of the re-oriented (now in landscape) version of mydoc.pdf. Now you can copy or email the file tmp.pdf to your KT and read your PDF file in landscape mode. I’ve yet to check if pdftk works in Mac OS (I won’t be surprised if it does) though I believe this pseudo-hack might turn out to be more “graphical” or point-and-click in nature than my commandline solution above. A user from the Amazon KT support page above mentioned using a professional version of Adobe reader to graphically do this, perhaps in Windows and in Mac OS as well. I’d appreciate if somebody would post a link on how to do this graphically in Ubuntu (GNU/Linux), Mac OS, and even in….Windows… 
Happy hacking and Kindling.
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Tags: Amazon, Amazon Kindle, Amazon Kindle Touch, commandline, hack, Kindle, Kindle Touch, landscape mode, PDF, pdftk, Ubuntu
December 13, 2011 at 6:26 pm |
Thank you very much for this blog. I was not sure whether to buy KT or not. But with that PDF feature I am finally into it!
December 13, 2011 at 7:00 pm |
Welcome.
I think the KT is nice for reading PDF files but it’s mainly for reading other ebook formats like .mobi, .azw etc. 
December 14, 2011 at 12:11 pm |
Thanks. I got it to work in Win7 after eliminating all spaces in the file name.
December 14, 2011 at 1:03 pm |
Welcome Charles.
I think the pdftk command and the scripts should work even with spaces in the filename. 
Works great for me in Ubuntu. What I actually do is I append “landscape” at the end of the filename so I can discriminate between the portrait and landscape versions of a file. 
December 14, 2011 at 1:11 pm |
Just tried it on a couple of docs. Unfortunately, the page is still initially displayed at the same reduced scale, and so one has to zoom in to read and out to change pages, as before. Even so, the document is more legible zoomed to the page width, so the panning is mostly just up and down, instead of all over the page. Most pages are readable with just a few gestures per page. I think Amazon needs to rethink this.
December 14, 2011 at 1:32 pm |
Yes the PDF file starts initially at page height view even with the PDF file in landscape mode. But the panning as you said, once in landscape view, is mostly up and down once you’ve zoomed in on a comfortable view for you. I do agree that Amazon should create a software update for view rotation, so please write to them (just as I have) so more of us will be heard.
I posted Amazon’s customer support email reply to me at an earlier comment here. 
So I really hope Amazon creates updates for this really nice gadget we have here.
Additionally, from what I’ve read around the Web, it seems that after jailbreaking a Kindle Touch, people have found very interesting features and hardware from the Kindle Touch, such as an accelerometer and a mic…Google should help you find those.
December 14, 2011 at 1:19 pm |
Sorry, I didn’t see your response when I posted the above. In Windows, what Cygwin gets from the OS truncates at the first space encountered. There was no output at all from the script invoked on files with spaces in the names, but it worked when I substituted underscores. I opened the batch file in a command window and ran it with the name of a file in the same directory as the first variable (%1), and could see the error messages complaining that it could not find file “firstWord” and then “secondWord”. I know the fix in Windows is to put the whole file spec in quotes, but I do not know how to fix the script to do that. I’m weak on shell scripts in *IX.
December 14, 2011 at 2:42 pm |
Thanks for raising the issue (assuming you’re referring to my scripts…). I uploaded a new version which should deal with spaced filenames better…
December 15, 2011 at 1:25 am |
New try…I had forgotten to change the drive in the batch file, because cygwin is installed on my drive f:
Now it works OK for document names with no spaces, but I get these cygwin warnings and errors:
c:\Scripts>rotatePDF Holland and Hadfield 2004 Molecular phylogenetics and evolu
tion.pdf
c:\Scripts>F:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe c:\scripts\rotatepdf.sh Holland
cygwin warning:
MS-DOS style path detected: c:\scripts\rotatepdf.sh
Preferred POSIX equivalent is: /cygdrive/c/scripts/rotatepdf.sh
CYGWIN environment variable option “nodosfilewarning” turns off this warning.
Consult the user’s guide for more details about POSIX paths:
http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using.html#using-pathnames
Holland
Error: Failed to open PDF file:
Holland
Errors encountered. No output created.
Done. Input errors, so no output created.
December 18, 2011 at 8:20 pm |
did you download then new version?
It may still have bugs, but it works on my win7…