Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

Yeah I’ve def been put off buying books because the reviews say they’re riddled with typos - don’t think it’s too much to ask for my 8 quid to get me a proofread book

I posted on Twitter I think last year these photos of two books I’d found that had typos on the spine & all I kept thinking was imagine being the author, putting all that work in & finally getting your book out & there’s a mistake on the fucking cover. I’d never show my face again

imagine if you had a book published and there was a typo on the damn spine pic.twitter.com/TIoW5q0uXi

— Autechrey Horne (@TytoPollens) October 28, 2017

you don't understand, Heoine is the name of my protagonist

Part 2. Srsly wouldn't it bum you the fuck out pic.twitter.com/SkXQWgRFor

— Autechrey Horne (@TytoPollens) November 3, 2017

I get most of my reading recs off amazon/goodreads scores and reviews. Not sure where else I would.

Whatever you say mr bezos

i tell you what, i've struggled to find a good site or even individual articles with credible recommendations for academic-ish books, feel like there's a gap.

^^^good point
Inquiring libgen users want to know!

there was a popular printing of the douglas adams's hitchhiker's trilogy that mixed up "galaxy" and "universe" on the spine.

Amazon are a publisher as well as a bookseller and they refuse to publish epubs so if you own a kobo and want to buy a book published by amazon - say, the 2018 arthur c clarke award winner - you are shit out of luck. I guess i could maybe buy a kindle edition and convert it with calibre, or even [gasps] buy the paperback. Still, one more reason to fuck amazon.

calibre didn't work on my last amazon purchase. I don't if this is something that has been ironed out in an update since. But I found this nifty little DRM stripper/format converter called epubor that was up to the the job.

If you delete your current software, install Kindle version 1.18 (I think) and block updates, it will keep downloading versions that Calibre can easily convert

ah yeah I'd forgotten about that. it wasn't strictly a "purchase" I was having problems with - it was something I'd acquired from l18g3n, in the new amazon format.

ive grabbed a fire hd in the sales, grand little job.

probably a lot harder to get stuff onto it...outside of yknow buying it like. but a nice piece of kit.

Calibre can convert any other format ebooks you have to .mobi and lets you edit metadata, automatically clump your books into folders by author or topic etc etc

next over-smokey scotch is on me if tru

clumps, sounds untidy

its lumps of 100, v logical

Kids have Fire HDs and it's a piece of piss getting books on there with Calibre

Calibre is shit hot and for any annoying amazon drm issues it can't handle I use Epubor.

Only epubs really worth converting tho, mobified pdfs are for shit

Plus if you use something like Aldiko, you won't even have to convert your epubs to mobis

reading a real book at the moment and it's difficult, having to hold it open and trying not to fall asleep on top of it and creasing the cover.

there's a new kobo model, the Clara, which looks nice and is backlit (for reading without the light on and between bands) but is less pocket friendly. plus my mini is still perfectly ok apart from a couple of the little lugs that keep the cover on having snapped off making it a tiny bit loose in one corner.

amazon UK monthly deal is currently 300 different self-help books. zzzzzzz....

Clara seems like a Paperwhite+ with some added smart-backlighting and I still don't understand what the point of HD ink is. Will probably end up bidding for a 2nd hand one when the price starts dropping.

oh, they were £30 or £40 cheaper over christmas, hence my interest. not so bothered now.

i can just about see the pixels on my mini at 600x800, especially before a page refresh. the clara's 1072x1448 will be a lot crisper. the antialiasing helps a lot though and it doesn't look any worse than the text you get in typeset books.

does it help it render PDFs any better than lower resolution e-inks?

the only pdfs i use on my kobo are cross-stitch patterns which are tiny but still readable scaled down (up?) to 600x800.

but theoretically, yes.

whispersync would be a genius feature if it fucking worked

reading comics on the kindle app on a tablet is A/A+, almost as good as actual paper comics. a decade ago I read 300+ Amazing Spider-Man issues on a CBR program on a PC and it was a far worse experience.

Mandatory software update for my kobo mini, without which something bad but unspecified will happen after Feb 28th, I think they are dropping support. It has lost my place in all those unfinished books.

Not entirely sure why I bothered given that I never buy books from them and only have one device so syncing between devices isn't important.

All the pages look slightly wrong too, like the fonts have changed, or the spacing, or something.

huh? what's going to happen? I keep my old Kobo offline. I have a feeling my last one somehow died due to constant syncing with Pocket, crap getting corrupted

nobody knows. you should have an email telling you it'll happen. it's only the minis and a few older machines.

best guess is here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3805344&postcount=14

basically without the update any factory reset after the date will fail because it'll try to use to outdated and soon to be disabled security protocols.

at least the kobos are easy to back up. and, if push comes to shove, you can take out the sd card containing the operating system and reinstall it that way.

I wonder if it introduces an update that stops de-DRMing with Calibre, the way the recent Kindle updates seem to.

if that happens I'd recommend giving Epubor a try.

the Kobo Clara is down to £80 again at the moment. tempting... (love my mini but it has no backlight)

not Kindle-specific but adding foreign language reviews of things on Amazon is kind of pointless. it's bad enough they mix reviews of different editions together...

There's a decent selection of non-fiction on sale today. I bought "Fooled By Randomness" and "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire".

I've been using my eReader a lot lately as I tackle a number of books with 500+ pages, tempted by the newer waterproof Kobo models but frankly my ancient Nook with backlight is doing just fine so. That Kobo Aura One limited edition though...

Amazon appears to be tracking every tap on Kindle. I just got my data back and there are 90K rows of this pic.twitter.com/wVCSXCTVwv

— Adrianne Jeffries (@adrjeffries) January 28, 2020

https://onezero.medium.com/kindle-hackers-are-disabling-tracking-and-ads-d00d1ad804b0

after a few months my paperwhite stopped displaying ads as a screensaver. I took it out of aeroplane mode for 2 minutes and am stuck with ads again. I don't particularly want to play Zork but I'm going to jailbreak this fucker if it is the last thing I ever do.

that last firmware update (5.12.3) is fatally unjailbreakable atm :(

Mine's been in airplane mode for about 3 years now

that's the only way to do it. I got a message to turn it off because of some japanese content and it sneaked the latest firmware onto me - fucking scum of the earth amazon!

wtf at the odd little to-and-fro between kindle designer and ilxor near the beginning of this thread.

I paid the twenty bucks to not have ads and I don’t regret it

My kindle died last summer and I replaced it with a Kobo (mostly because this allows me to borrow books from libraries here in Canada) and I have to stay I am very happy with it and seeing stuff like the tweet above just confirms that I made the right decision

Haven't designed any Kindles in a long time, and changed my DN a few years ago, but I'm still around. That back-and-forth was a real bummer at the time though. I was all excited about something I worked on and it felt bad to get shit on over it. Usually I just get ignored!

Hmm, really going to have to look into the Kobo app/store as a replacement for my Kindle app (which I hate myself for loving)