Personally I have gradually gravitated away from physical books and utilize iPad and a laptop.
iPad combined with Dropbox to read PDF:s with and a laptop with Dropbox to prep and have my
notes in. I have tried using an iPad during gaming, but it is difficult to browse through when you need
some specific info like a chart or whatnot and you don´t remember exactly which book it is in. PDF´s are
technically immortal but then again if you have a WW3 nuclear armageddon scenario, you likely need the
physical copies to play in your bunker 

Dropbox (and likely other similar software aswell) has a search function built in it where you can type a
keyword and it retrieves the word from all the PDF´s you have in it, which can be immensely useful especially
if you are playing a detail heavy campaign, whether it is your notes or PDF material.

I'm a 'PDF first' person and have been for years. I used to do a lot of travelling for work and having my entire RPG collection available to read while in a boring hotel of an evening is a big plus.

The right kit makes it a very pleasant experience in my opinion. To illustrate, here's a pic of a GURPS book alongside the same page on my iPad Pro 12.9:



The image is almost 100% to life size with no cropping required. For smaller books, like Savage Worlds, you can read a two-page spread in landscape very easily, too.

Having good software also makes the experience better. I use GoodReader and it has a number of really handy features like adding my own bookmarks, the ability to have multiple PDFs open at the same time on screen, the ability to have two non-contiguous pages from the same PDF open at the same time, a 'flip back' button which takes you back to the page you were previously on, and the ability to zoom out to (decent sized) thumbnails so you can quickly locate what you are looking for.

The hardware also makes it more pleasant to use. The iPad Pro screen is laminated which reduces glare when reading outside, and the latest model can go to 1000 nits when in bright conditions. It's super snappy and you can spin through pages on big PDFs at speed like flicking through a book, too. The latest devices with 'FaceID' are attention-aware which means the screen doesn't auto-shut while you are using it, either.

They aren't cheap, but they are good and last a long time. When I upgrade to new devices I sell my old ones and offer friends first refusal. My gaming group have bought my last three iPad Pros and all of them are still in use, going back to the original from 2015.

Was considering an iPad but it feels overkill and while I like MacOS, I'm not a big fan of iOS.
The Pro feels like overkill for the operating system.  Wish they would just merge the two somehow and I'd buy one.  Nice though.

Ended up getting a Lenovo ThinkPad x13.  Touch sensitive screen with the pen and break-away keyboard.  Runs Windows, so I can use Sumatra (love that app) for PDF's and still get the touch-sensitive aspect for Owlbear, etc. on a decent screen I can put down on a table and everyone can see/use it for battle-boards.

Considered Android but prefer an OS I know well and can run Foundry etc. on if need be.
Felt like a good solution for my needs.

My son's high school switched to ebooks and they're terrible.  I can learn the material for one of his unit tests to help him review in about 10 minutes with a paper book;  with the ebook it's at least an hour for a plethora of reasons.  We finally gave up on it and bought copies of the textbooks for ourselves.  Reading a novel works okay, except for eye strain;  books used for reference, like an rpg or textbook, not so much.  I would never, ever try to use a pdf or other screen representation of material at an actual game.  If it's only available as a pdf, I would print the parts I plan to use.

I have a Supernote which I use primarily for note-taking and for component prototyping. I like the thing enough that I got the smaller one, too, but I mostly use them as notebooks.

I'd say it's use for RPG PDFs is...OK. You can get it to work, but there are some definite difficulties.

The PROs are that the Supernote is a distraction-free device with no apps or web-browser. It's really hard to get distracted with it; it really is just a digital notepad. You can screenshare and load email onto it, but that's it. It has a TON of navigation features, like stars on your notes which you can search for, and Digests, which are sections of text you select and can quickly access from the menu. Also, the EInk display is very easy on the eyes; it's like looking at paper. In fact, one of the features the manufacturer is really proud of is that the self-healing screen and ceramic nib combination doesn't need replacement nibs and does feel quite a bit like writing on the cover of a composition notebook. I'm not going to say it feels like paper, but it certainly doesn't feel sloppy the way an LCD usually does.

The CONs are that the screen is black and white with no backlight. Artwork doesn't come out that clearly. More to the point, however, the processor is quite slow compared to an LCD tablet. You can split the books into chapters or render the PDF in black and white before loading it onto the Supernote, both of which make navigating much faster. If you are willing to do that and add Digests for points of interest, the Supernote works quite well, but just throwing on a full-color 300+ page PDF doesn't work well at all. You have to actually work on the PDF to make it usable for the device, which is...annoying to say the least.

A last note is that the styluses are expensive; about $30 to $50 per, and you can't write on it without a Supernote Stylus or a very few compatible aftermarket styluses.

Advice: If that sounds interesting to you, wait until the A5X 2, which gets a processor upgrade.

I use my phone and my laptop to read game book .pdf's when I am travelling, and when I am at a table with friends, I use physical books. 

I always try to buy physical and .pdf copies of my games.  If I forget to bring a particular book to a session, I usually have it on my phone. 

I am almost constatntly reading gaming books, but I rely on my phone as it is just so much easier.  Buying another device seems like a pointless step.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 16, 2023, 01:33:30 AM

Quote from: VisionStorm on April 15, 2023, 09:09:38 PM
I just use my phone (Moto G Stylus currently; old iPhone 5 (I think) before that). I also use my laptop sometimes, specially when prepping stuff. But when it comes to actually reading through the whole PDF, I usually just lay down with my phone and some reading glasses (started needing them these past few years). For actual play, I'll use either my laptop or my phone. Phone is more convenient overall for purposes of carrying it around, but laptop is a bit better for organizing stuff during play, just inconvenient to haul around, specially now that my monitor is busted and can't close without breaking.

I used to bring my laptop to gaming sessions, but would up distracted by it, so I leave it behind unless I explicitly need it. For running an X-Wing tournament, for example.

One thing I don't like about laptops is that the monitor gets in the way of looking at the time when rolls are made and such, and creates a barrier between players and the GM, kind of like GM Screens, which I never got used to and only tried out briefly when I first started out. But keeping track everything--adventure details, enemies, characters, damage, order of actions, etc.--is much quicker and easier with a laptop using office software than with a phone or hand notes.

I've been messing around with tablets for a while, and I've tried black and white e-ink models, color e-ink ones and "standard" tablets.
Right now I'm using a Lenovo P11 as the main reading device; pretty good screen, very fast and (big bonus) the smart pen which makes it possible to easily use drawing apps for quick sketches, maps and so on.
The second best is Boox Note Air 2, 10" black and white e-ink tablet: it does nearly anything the Lenovo does (including sketches and hand writing), the only problem is the black and white screen (really excellent in every other aspect).

I got a Amazon Fire Tablet 10"s.

It works for .pdfs but is not great.

I don't use it for rpg .pdfs as I only buy print RPGS, not .pdfs.

PDFs are generally frustrating because every PDF author has different ideas about what should be linked and what should require manual page selection, and also each PDF application tends to vary wildly in performance and features.  Want to go directly to a page?  On desktop that's easy, on iPad this suddenly is a giant question mark. 

Overall, the best solution is a couple tablets each open to different things, which is similar but better in value to a small stack of books, which is narrowly in front of a single screen with the ability to switch rapidly between different views. 

In practice, I use one screen as a player and one screen and some printouts as a DM, with book reference if I absolutely have to.  I like not having to take up as much space as I did when I was fully analog back in the day and had a backpack of crap to take to every game I was running.

I have been messing around with using a Kindle Scribe. I absolutely love the device.

It feels exactly like paper when you write on it. You can upload your prep and materials, generally with a single click.

Existing products are about 50/50 on if they will format perfectly to support writing, different font sizes, etc. But if not, they still represent the PDF. Pictures and art are of course in black and white, but that is not always a drop off.

Long term I'm just not sure if it can replace my usual setup. I usually bring dice and a single leather bound notebook. The kind with the strap that wraps around it a couple times.

Yup - Kindle Fire (forget which size; 7inch seems right).  Works just fine for pdfs as well as YouTube which seems to be the two most used programs/functions it's used for.

Could stand to get a larger screen size as my eyes ain't what they used to be.

Oh. The new Google Pixel is supposed to be an 11" with 8G of RAM. With it sharing the SOC from the Pixel 7, I'm hoping it will take GrapheneOS.

I have a tablet but not just, or even principally for RPG books. It's first and foremost a general eBook reader and a massive reference library in a portable format.

I'm currently on a Samsung Galaxy (6 I think, but I'd have to look).

One thing that I did for pdfs, not just RPGs but in general, is my third monitor is in portrait, not landscape. This is something I've adopted from work where I run two portrait and one landscape.

Quote from: PulpHerb on April 18, 2023, 02:46:44 PM
I have a tablet but not just, or even principally for RPG books. It's first and foremost a general eBook reader and a massive reference library in a portable format.

I'm currently on a Samsung Galaxy (6 I think, but I'd have to look).

One thing that I did for pdfs, not just RPGs but in general, is my third monitor is in portrait, not landscape. This is something I've adopted from work where I run two portrait and one landscape.

Yea, our Audio Mix department does that and it looks awesome.  Should get a cheap third monitor portrait and ditch the pillarbox for PDF's.