Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

(spoke too soon, payment rejected)

That exact same thing happened to me last night! I got an email saying the card issuer wouldn't accept the transaction. I'd put the order through without registering and the email said if you wanted to check on your order you had to log in (which obviously I couldn't do). I tried to do the online chat thing to sort it out this morning, but after entering my details it went to a 404 error. Starting to see why they've knocked the price off.

Anyway, gave up on that and ordered through John Lewis (b/c 2year warranty) instead. Picking it up from local waitrose tomorrow.

hey so I bought one of these the other day. I have two questions:

1) is it possible to tweak the metadata in Calibre so that my Kindle will display an author's work or a series in chronological order, or am I going to have to brutally stick years/months into the head of the title of every novel?

2) can the Send To Kindle plugin for Firefox be set up to send articles to other ppl's kindles or only your own?

it said i could use Visa but only have Visa Debit card, so maybe that was the problem. also, the Verified By Visa thing didn't pop up so maybe it was that. the link in the error email didn't work (not registered...) and the support email address (b&n) bounced.

tried argos, they had nothing in stock locally but would let me order one for pickup locally in 5 days time. the 1 ended up as 2, somehow and then i got an 'out of stock' email.

will try john lewis, or might just pop to blackwells (or john lewis i guess), see if they have any there.

as for charli's questions, i doubt the first one is possible unless kindle has a sort-by-artist-then-date option. i had the same problem with a 13 volume set and ended up putting the volume number in the title, clumsy as that was (but less clumsy than adding the date).

the second one might use the email to kindle interface in which case it might be possible to specify another email address. letting people send random things to random kindles sounds like a disaster waiting to happen though.

"You will be prompted to register with your Amazon.com account after installation is complete by entering your Amazon.com account e-mail address and password." oh, i guess not then, unless you know those details.

just ordered one from blackwells via paypal. will see if it arrives.

then, checked email to find a message from NOOK

"Dear Valued Customer,

We are writing to you about your recent nook.co.uk order.

Recently you may have received an email from us stating that we had some difficulty
charging your credit card. We are pleased to tell you that the problem has been
resolved. We experienced some system issues due to the widespread interest in our
limited time offer on NOOK Simple Touch. We hope that you will return to nook.co.uk
to place your order again.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused."

ah, ok, reading that seems to suggest that the original order didn't go through. thought i'd end up with two then (which wouldn't be the end of the world but...)

Haha I got the same email. I think you're right - eiher related to visa debit or lack of online password thingumy.

This statement in wikipedia has been enough to make me hesitate over getting a Nook Simple Touch:

it has 2 GB of internal memory of which only half is available for content. Of the 1 GB of content, 750 MB is reserved for content from Barnes & Noble's e-book store, which leaves approximately 250 MB for other files

I know why they do this, but I hate them for it already.

I have 70 books on it. I can manage to find something to read whatever my mood. And there's an SD slot if for some reason I wanted it to be my library. That division of memory is entirely irrelevant in practical use.

yeah you need a micro SD card. Then you're golden.

So, it doesn't enforce this 3:1 split on your micro SD? That's good to know. I suppose I could swap books into the internal memory, too. I expect I'll take the ebook reader plunge this year, then.

My rule of thumb is anything bigger than 1 mb goes on the sd card; the rest goes on the internal memory. Like the man said, when you're actually using us there is no distinction between what's sd and what's internal anyway.

Last question: when the sd card is inside its slot, does it tuck in flush with the edge of the reader, or does it stick out at all?

There's a little rubbery door-plug thing that hides the micro sd slot. I haven't had it open up unintentionally at all.

thx

do any of you use overdrive?

the app, the service, the ebook library whatever it is

yeah chicago public library does their e-book stuff through overdrive. probably most public libraries do (though there is more competition now)

uh, oh, another email from nook (who said they'd rejected my card, so i ordered another one from blackwells)

"Dear Valued Customer,

Thank you for your purchase. We want to provide an update on your order.
You should expect to receive your NOOK® Simple Touch within the next 4-5
business days."

and, of course, they send the email with a 'chat to one of our experts' 20 minutes after the helpline closes.

lol me too!

"Dear Valued Customer,

You recently received an email from NOOK customer service indicating that
your NOOK Simple Touch would be shipped shortly.

We apologize for this error but your credit card was not charged as NOOK
Simple Touch is temporarily out of stock..."

THIS IS A SAGA NOW

for charli's questions, i doubt the first one is possible unless kindle has a sort-by-artist-then-date option.

I was using Calibre to get things ready for purchase of Kindle, and it has all sorts of "date sort" and "author sort" fields that I was diligently filling out in advance, but seems the Kindle doesn't give the slightest fuck about them ;_;

i had the same problem with a 13 volume set and ended up putting the volume number in the title, clumsy as that was (but less clumsy than adding the date).

Yeah, I'm doing it with four-five decades each of two prolific authors' work, plus whittling down 280 Doctor Who novels across five different series into a select hundred-odd I want to read in publication order

Nook simple touch has a nice 'shelves' function which is basically playlists of books. One way to address that.

I never understand why anyone shelves things any way other than alphabetical by subject matter irl

Though obviously I have sympathies for shelving autobiographically.

is it still impossible to put pdfs on these

no, i haven't put one on there in forever but i just rightclicked a pdf file and 'send to kindle' was an option (which it isn't for epub files). i'd probably still use calibre or something to format it to mobi though, reading pdfs on kindle was a pain ime.

calibre to convert pdf to a format like epub or mobi works well?

it works. generally not too well, in my experience. Often loses formatting, so page and lie breaks can be a bit odd. still readable, but sure not pretty.

can you put it in your carousel?

You can send PDFs to Amazon and they'll Kindle them for you. I did it once and a couple of small things went wrong but it was pretty good for a free service.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200767360

yeah you just email pdfs to a special address and they show up on your kindle

super easy

for some reason that doesnt work for me

Most of the PDFs I've sent to Kindle have come back a godawful mess, full of random capitalisation problems and usually with things like the left-over title, author and page number in the middle of a sentence.

same here. surely there must be some way of converting a pdf into a usable, if not perfect, mobi/epub file

Calibre has some advanced preferences for conversion that are supposed to help with pdf craziness but I have not figured them out.

I bet if you had Acrobat Pro or Nitro you could convert them to Word, edit them a bit, and get them to convert to mobi pretty nicely.

You can, but it takes a looooong time: you can do a find/replace on the title/author on each page, but I don't know of any easy way to get rid of page numbers.

same here. surely there must be some way of converting a pdf into a usable, if not perfect, mobi/epub file

― NI, Tuesday, May 7, 2013 6:56 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ehhhh they are v. different kinds of files; I can't imagine a conversion being anything better than "adequate" in the best of cases.

it's all text, bro. all it needs is some way of working out what are line breaks and what are end-of-paragraphs, plus yeah getting rid of page numbers, author name etc. it'd never be 100% perfect but i'm sure there's a way of getting it better than the ugly broken mess we get now. (obv the more image-heavy ones like comic strips, textbooks are a different matter but i'm talking about yer bog standard all-text book)

See, that's the thing, a lot of PDFs are not all text. A fair portion are just an image and then a OCR-ed invisible text layer which is what you get when you try highlighting, which is why copy/pasting even from Acrobat Reader is glitchy. Those that are text tend to include the text of everything on the page, including headers/footers, with those sections having no clear way to differentiate them from the content.

I mean, for books distributed as PDF you're unlikely to have the issues with the main body of text, but I was trying to copy from an essay I was reading in PDF the other day and it very clearly was a text layer over an image because the spacing was fucked.

ah ok, wasn't aware of that. main problem im having is the text size - had to ditch more than one pdf book because the text was tiny and unreadable. often get a problem when highlighting & saving text in that it saves either a load of garbled symbols, or different text from a few pages prior. messy.

the text would be scaleable... if it was actually text!

See, that's the thing, a lot of PDFs are not all text. A fair portion are just an image and then a OCR-ed invisible text layer which is what you get when you try highlighting, which is why copy/pasting even from Acrobat Reader is glitchy. Those that are text tend to include the text of everything on the page, including headers/footers, with those sections having no clear way to differentiate them from the content.

Exactly--try downloading a scanned book from the Internet Archive, and then actually cutting and pasting the text: what looks right as an image will be an OCRed garbled nightmare.

a nexus or other small tablet works a lot better if you are going to be reading a lot of pdfs.

yeah i read pdfs most frequently on my phone tbh

all my school reading is jstor pdfs these days and i read them on a galaxy tab

i miss my university jstor sub

it appears I'll be able to continue getting access to stuff w/ my college account in perpetuity, which is delightful.

*posts intranetz emoticon for envious, except he doesn't know it*