Quit complaining. Convert the PDF yourself. The damned thing was free! Perhaps they should send us an iPad to read it on too?

Surely your "smartphone" can read a PDF?

Try this yourself.

Compare the reading experience of a PDF to that of an ePUB or other ebook-specific format.

I've recently started using Moon-Reader on Android. And ... it's pretty awesome. Text is legible, you can read pages without zooming/panning pages, text fluidly fills the page, graphics are supported, navigation is very fluid, controls are, if not "intuitive", very discoverable and stay out of your face.

Plus the whole application is designed for reading multiple books. There's a bookshelf, access to local storage (if you need that), and online ePUB libraries (OPDS format).

I've tried converting from other formats to ePUB via Calibre, and it's a bit hit-or-miss. It seems to be broken currently in Debian/wheezy. Under Ubunto 11.10, I may or may not get something that's actually converted, and the formatting can be really, really broken.

Oh, and in ePUB/Moon-Reader, if you leave the book or app and go back -- you're where you left off (as with a dedicated hardware eBook reader). Unlike every PDF reader I've experience on Android, where you start off again from page 1.

Sorry, but the mobile PDF experience is extremely broken.

Actually, other than printing to paper (or previewing same), the PDF experience is extremely broken. I'd prefer ePUB for pretty much all my documentation these days.

I don't read books on a phone and the PDF viewing experience on an iPad is perfectly fine. Is there another "mobile" that I'm missing?

I haven't dropped a dime on an iPad (or other tablet device) yet.

If you'll note my points, there's functionality above and beyond just plain display that a proper eBook app has. From what I've seen, present PDF readers lack these.

Whatever other "mobile" formats come into being, relying on a publication format which presumes a fixed, print-based output (in any of several internationally incompatible formats -- I've just learned of the US letter/A4 hybrid though I've also instantly forgotten its name) ... in a world in which text displays are overwhelmingly both electronic and fluid, strikes me as very backward.

Constant zooming and panning for every page turn and no ability to alter the font, size or color. Sure, smartphones can render PDFs just fine, but reading long PDFs on small screens is just a miserable experience inherit to the format.

Personally I find that epub rearranges itself better for font size / screen size that a smart phone offers. PDFs are usually painful to read because you have to scroll the page sideways to get the font size I like.

But from memory the book is not image heavy, so converting to a text doc (or epub format) should be a very easy cut 'n paste, so the parent comment is a little bit on the ungrateful side.