Kobo Books has added 175,000 PDFs to their ebook library from more than 2,000 publishers, including Prentice-Hall, McGraw-Hill, Blackwell, Palgrave, The World Bank, Springer, Financial Times Press, Routledge, and others.
The PDFs include medical texts, academic and scientific texts, dictionaries, economics and business manuals, technical manuals, and other education oriented materials.
“Learning happens everywhere. Kobo believes that everyone should have digital access to textbooks, reference works, and academic materials anywhere in the world,” said Michael Tamblyn, EVP Sales & Merchandising for Kobo. “The simplicity of downloading PDFs to an eReader or a laptop allows increased access to educational materials and expanded mobility and reading options. Whether it’s a university text, new and relevant “For Dummies” book, or a Medical dictionary, we are allowing Kobo users in 200 countries access to the latest academic and scientific content.”
The PDFs are encrypted with Adobe DRM and will work with desktop computers and most ereaders, but will not work with Kobo’s ereading apps for smartphones, Android, iPad, etc, since those don’t support PDF format.
It’s odd that Kobo doesn’t have their apps setup for PDF files; these new PDFs would display much better on the iPad and Android tablets than an E Ink ereader with a 6″ screen.
They put their customers in a tough situation with this, actually. Ebook readers with smaller 6″ screens are notoriously ineffective for reading complex PDFs that are designed for a much larger layout.
And Kobo doesn’t offer any sample to download to see if it’s going to layout well on your ereader or not. So unless you intend to read these PDFs on a computer, it’s more or less a crapshoot as to how well they’re going to display on an ereader like the Kobo Reader, which really is far from the best choice for PDFs anyway as far 6″ ereaders go.
At any rate, here’s a new section at Kobo for the top PDFs.
Kobo’s most popular PDFs from the business, health, and marketing categories include: