Large textbooks on a PDF Reader

[shockedlattice]

Currently the owner of an iPhone 6+ and iPad 3. Entering medical school and have a large library of 1000+ page textbooks in PDF and ePub form that can be up to 350MB. My favorite PDF annotation software right now is PDF Expert 5 but it is very slow on the iPad and crashes constantly on the iPhone when I have any document greater than 50MB. Good reader is faster with less crashes but lacks continuous vertical scrolling and is not as smooth at annotating/highlighting IMO.

Will an upgrade to an iPad Air 2 or 9.7" iPP be a worthwhile investment if this is my primary use for the iPad? Will I see a noticeable difference in PDF Expert? Ideally I would go to the Apple Store and load PDF Expert with one of my large PDFs onto their models and see the difference but I doubt they would let me. Any opinions are appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[Cascades42]

Unfortunately I don't have PDF Expert but I can confirm I have some very large (200MB+) PDFs in GoodReader on my iPad Air 2 and it works flawlessly. That said, I'm currently breaking my PDF textbooks down into chapters which makes things easier to read and easier on the system too.

 

[canuckRus]

Currently the owner of an iPhone 6+ and iPad 3. Entering medical school and have a large library of 1000+ page textbooks in PDF and ePub form that can be up to 350MB. My favorite PDF annotation software right now is PDF Expert 5 but it is very slow on the iPad and crashes constantly on the iPhone when I have any document greater than 50MB. Good reader is faster with less crashes but lacks continuous vertical scrolling and is not as smooth at annotating/highlighting IMO.

Will an upgrade to an iPad Air 2 or 9.7" iPP be a worthwhile investment if this is my primary use for the iPad? Will I see a noticeable difference in PDF Expert? Ideally I would go to the Apple Store and load PDF Expert with one of my large PDFs onto their models and see the difference but I doubt they would let me. Any opinions are appreciated.

Thanks!

Wonder if 14 day test drive would be of use?

 

[friedmud]

Currently the owner of an iPhone 6+ and iPad 3. Entering medical school and have a large library of 1000+ page textbooks in PDF and ePub form that can be up to 350MB. My favorite PDF annotation software right now is PDF Expert 5 but it is very slow on the iPad and crashes constantly on the iPhone when I have any document greater than 50MB. Good reader is faster with less crashes but lacks continuous vertical scrolling and is not as smooth at annotating/highlighting IMO.

Will an upgrade to an iPad Air 2 or 9.7" iPP be a worthwhile investment if this is my primary use for the iPad? Will I see a noticeable difference in PDF Expert? Ideally I would go to the Apple Store and load PDF Expert with one of my large PDFs onto their models and see the difference but I doubt they would let me. Any opinions are appreciated.

Thanks!

I would go with the 12.9" iPad Pro. The extra RAM helps out quite a bit when reading large PDFs (I have huge textbooks I read in both Kindle and PDF Expert just fine on the 12.9" iPP)

 

[shockedlattice]

As much as I would love the 4GB RAM and USB 3 the extra size weight and cost of the 12.9" iPP rules it out. Thank you for the suggestion though. I'm sure the next 9.7" iPP will have more RAM but I could play that "the next one is better" waiting game forever.

The idea of breaking my PDFs into smaller files by section/chapter is tempting, but is a huge task, and I want to be able to search an entire text for keywords all at once.