Because it’s fun.
But sad.
Since the earliest iPhone that could download a Google Books PDF, I’ve been doing these damned tests, waiting for the day when an iProduct would be powerful enough to display them without making me want to rip out of all of my hair. (Yes, these tests have been going on for years!)
That day is almost here.
But there’s a bug in iOS and a bug in iBooks and the combination of the two causes Google Books PDFs to crash and the JPEG2000-format Processed World PDFs from The Internet Archive to bring an iPad to its knees.
I could live with having to reformat the Processed World PDFs. JPEG2000 is a monstrous format that gives even desktop PCs fits.
But Apple needs to make it a priority to fix the bugs that cause Google Books PDFs to crash with iBooks.
This is particularly embarrassing for Apple with these two videos that showing iBooks crashing with Pushing to the Front. This is an 800-plus paged Google Books PDF I was able to read completely and problem-free on a much less powerful Asus MeMo Pad 7 using SmartQ Reader!
iPad Mini 4 Pushing to the Front PDF 1
iPad Mini 4 Pushing to the Front PDF 2
And just to rub it all in, a different issue of The American Magazine (with some gorgeous color in it):
iPad Mini 4 American Magazine 1914
Note that iBooks is all I can test on a demo unit. Apple has yet to see fit to put a demo version of a PDF app on an iPad, as they do with several games and productivity apps.
Previously here:
Video: Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 8.0 Extreme PDF Test
Video: iPad Pro Extreme PDF Test
Video: iPad Mini 4 Extreme PDF Test (Plus Tablet Thoughts)
Mike Cane's Atomic Supermen 
I really don’t think PDFs on iBooks are their focus area. :-) You could always file bug reports…
Radars were filed by expert Steven Troughton-Smith. How I wound up knowing there are such bugs.
Apple’s pretended focus is to make things simply work. They should be ashamed of not fulfilling this mantra for iBooks.
I don’t think they can call any iPad Pro if it can’t do that with bundled software.