Overall Impressions

I’m carrying a whole library with me, either on my Samsung Galaxy Tab or on my Kindle eBook reader. EBooks are cheaper than paper books, easier to procure, lighter and more fashionable. But they are available on many formats and Kindle Touch can read only .mobi format or pdf, so I need a conversion software from ePub to mobi or even from Pdf to mobi and a management software that doesn’t fail my expectations. Calibre is one of the most advanced eBook management utility and conversion tool available on the market and it get better with each version. The latest version, Calibre 0.8.24 supports all the available eBook formats and it can easily convert from one format to another, (pdf to mobi, pdf to epub, epub to pdf, doc to pdf, epub to pdf, etc. ). The DRM protected books are the only ones which can’t be converted.

Overall Impressions

Some of us are quite disappointed with big companies who monopolize some software markets and we just want a fresh approach. Foxit Reader provides a lightweight reader which loads pretty quickly, with more than decent features, even if it’s meant more for reading PDFs than changing and creating them. Fortunately, it supports bookmarks, has search capability, allows to annotate PDF files and can also print PDFs.

Installation

The installation is quite smooth, but there is an aspect you should pay attention at: in our case, no matter if we checked or unchecked the install the Firefox plugin option, some shortcuts were automatically checked: the desktop shortcut boxes, start menu shortcut and quick launch shortcut. Still, Foxit Reader’s installation kit is 12Mb, while Adobe is 320Mb, so it installs and open a lot faster. The diference between them is that Foxit Reader doesn’t boasts its cousin’s crowdy plug-ins, credit lists, etc. Foxit Reader is supported on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.