I read a lot of screenplays, so I'd been eyeing a Kindle for years. Every time I print 110 pages to read once - and maybe not even finish - I imagine a single tear rolling down Capt. Planet's cheek. But there are some quirks to be aware of when it comes to displaying a screenplay on the Kindle.
It all comes down to screen size. Books converted into Kindle format display less than a page on each Kindle page. But with screenplay formatting, and given that you're typically working off a PDF file, displaying a full page on the Kindle screen makes the print pretty small.
Getting a PDF screenplay to display well on a Kindle is the holy grail of cheap-ass screenwriters and producers. Start Googling and scouring message boards and you'll find dozens of your brethren on this quest. I know because I have. If you can afford to drop $300 plus on the bigger Kindle DX, you're golden. Otherwise, you'll have some choices to make.
Convert the PDF to text
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| A script converted to text |
There are several free web services and programs which will convert a PDF into a text document. I've become partial to
PDF to Word. Once you've got the script into a text format, you can use a program like
Calibre to convert the text to a format your Kindle can read, like MOBI, and send it to your Kindle.
This has become my preferred method for reading scripts. The text winds up at a very comfortable size for reading. As for formatting, it kinda works. Line breaks are maintained, so Dialogue and Action stays separate. Often, the indentation is maintained, but not always. You will get some wonky bits where action is indented, and every now and then, a character name jumps behind the character's dialogue. But here's the thing: If you've read a lot of scripts, you will hardly notice. You know when you're reading action or dialogue, even if the formatting cues aren't perfect.
There are a few steps involved in the conversion, but it goes very fast. I usually process a few scripts at a time. There is a delay before PDF to Word delivers its conversion via e-mail, but the dragging and dropping only takes a couple minutes.
The one catch: This only works from a PDF which was created electronically from the script file. It will not work with a script that was scanned into PDF form.
Rotate the Screen
Flipping the Kindle into Landscape mode boosts the size of the text to something more readable. This requires no reformatting. You can just send the PDF straight to your Kindle and flip it.
Again, the catch: In Landscape mode, your Kindle will display about 2/3 of a page at a time. So you read through to the bottom, advance the page, and now you're looking at the bottom 2/3 of that page. The top portion will repeat text that was on the previous page, so every time you flip, you'll have to scan a little bit to find the place you left off. It's not awful. And if you're reading from a scanned PDF, it's probably your best option. But I find it more distracting than the wonky formatting from the conversion method.
There's got to be a program that crops the margins
 |
This script had all the white
space cropped, but the Kindle
has added back margin space. |
Maybe someday there will be. But I've tried quite a few and not found anything that really does what you want this to do. Programs like Preview on the Mac and Adobe Acrobat have margin cropping options - but they don't actually crop the PDF, they just tell the viewer not to display the margins. When you send the "cropped" file to your Kindle, the margins will still be there.
I spent a lot of time working with a program called Briss which actually does crop PDF pages. It took several tries to get the program working, though the developer was very helpful and responsive. Eventually though, I was able to crop out nearly all the white margin space from screenplay PDFs.
But here's the problem: The Kindle seems to buffer anything with margin space. Comparing my cropped and uncropped files, once sent to my Kindle, there was very little difference. This may be due, in part, do a difference in the proportions of the cropped box and Kindle screen. For my money, the small gains in readability weren't worth the effort.
Given the intense interest from the too-cheap-to-buy-a-DX crowd, maybe someone will write a program which better addresses this. For now, I'm pretty sure these are our best options. Even though it's a bit of a hassle to read scripts on that little Kindle, I've never thought "I'd rather just print 110 pages."
