December 16, 2024

My Dungeon Master Tool Kit Part 4 - Affordable-ish Tablet for RPG PDFs

Finally, the Dungeoneering Dad has come back to his Dungeon Master Kit series (part 1, part 2, and part 3).

Why PDFs?

As much as I love the usefulness, lack of eye strain, and, dare I say it, the beauty of hard copy books, I've found myself using PDF copies of RPGs more and more. They take up less space (duh), support smaller publishers, and are typically cheaper. As of now, I have an online library of 693 items at DriveThruRPG (...not gonna lie, that's a bit embarrassing).

An actual gamer using a tablet in sheer ecstasy.

Why a Tablet?

less to cart around
access to a large library of PDFs
can search books electronically
feel like you're from the future

Why a Fire Tablet?

Rich Corinthian leather case.

Look, straight up, if you can afford an iPad, the Fire tablet can't compete. However, if you're budget-minded, I recommend the Fire. (It was known as the "Kindle Fire," but they seem to have dropped the "Kindle" part.) As I've mentioned a few times in ages past (linky link and linky link), I use a Fire for my RPG PDFs.

Nice things about the Fire:

Cheap-ish. Amazon puts them on sale multiple times a year (holidays, Prime Day, etc.).
Expandable storage with an SD Card.

From my understanding, you need an adapter to use an SD Card with an iPad.
With a Fire (and other Android tablets), you just pop the card in.

Spiffy cases: link

How to Add PDFs "Officially."

PDF readers aplenty.

Since a Fire isn't a normal tablet, there are a few easy ways to add files for use with the official Kindle app.

1. Use the "Send to Kindle" website to upload them: link

You'll need to use this particularly if the PDF files are large.

2. Email the PDF.

Each Amazon account has a "send-to-Kindle" email address (e.g., "Best_DM_Ever@kindle.com").
Simply email the PDF as an attachment to that address and it will show up in your Kindle app library before too long.

3. Connect your Fire to your PC and transfer them that way.

4. Get an SD Card, put that into your PC, load up the card, and then pop that into your Fire.

If you want more detailed info on these methods, this site is pretty useful: WikiHow: How to Add a PDF to a Kindle.

How to Make Your Fire More Useful and Super-Duper Cool!

My DriveThruRPG library... behold and tremble.

Since a Fire isn't a typical Android tablet, you can't typically use it like a normal tablet. However, you can pretty easily side-load the Google Play Store and then, bingo, you can install a lot more apps including, the DriveThruRPG Library app, a variety of PDF readers, etc.

Here is a great "How to Geek" article detailing how to get the Google Play Store: link
Here is a kind of spiffy PDF reader: EBookDroid

Once you do that, you can use a variety of nice apps to organize your library, although I'm starting to use the DriveThruRPG Library app itself more and more. If you used the SD Card method above, you can access the PDFs via a variety of PDF readers.

There you go. Bingo bango.