Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

I have a Kindle but spend a lot of time converting bootl3g epubs on calibre, Usually just a digital version of the paper that I’m reading at the time, so I can read it in the dark when my daughter’s sleeping, so it’s tempting to just buy a Kobo so I can skip Amazon entirely

That’ll teach me to dictate a post on Siri

Gah. Sometime in the last hour and somewhere in the 10ft between the sofa and the bed my kobo has developed a letter sized blob in the screen, about 90% down and central. Time to upgrade? Time to scour eBay?

I'm tempted. I've switched over to the Kobo app recently...the formatting is annoying (for some reason each sentence has to hit the margins, so there will often be three word sentences with a giant space in between each word, it seemed unreadable at first but I've gotten used to it). And after their last update, it got stuck in night mode permanently.

But it still feels better than using Amazon.

Ordered a new kobo Clara from the kobo store - it's not like I've been spending money on anything other than food lately. 7 to 10 days, it says, but 3 days later no tracking email yet. Could've ordered from Argos and picked it up the next day but lazy (also pandemic).

(minis on eBay are going for the same price I paid for mine 7 years ago)

clara has arrived. it's not that much bigger physically but the bevels are smaller so the reading area is larger by about an inch in height and half an inch in width. thinner too, and noticeably faster than the 8 year old mini. mini feels chunky and clunky already.

maybe it's time to organise all my ebooks. i want to fix shit like this, where the name of the book displays as, for example:

"Rosewater: Book 1 of the Wormwood Trilogy, Winner of the Nommo Award for Best Novel"

i guess that means using calibre and metadata editing 400 odd books. 8(

happily, the clara does a good job of upscaling the old 600x800 images i've been using for the mini. the new aspect ratio is odd, 1448 x 1072, or 1:1.35 ish, but that's close enough to 3:4

Still on the Mini. Still no one has done a newer one that size?

Found a liquidator on eBay selling the old, official clip light. Pretty much set for life now.

A modern mini would be sweet (says everybody who has a mini, unfortunately kobo don't seem to agree). The closest I've found is this

https://goodereader.com/blog/reviews/hisense-a5-e-ink-smartphone-review

Which is a 5" phone-format e-ink reader. Actually it IS a phone with an e-ink screen so it does too much and also costs too much. Phone screen looks slightly too narrow as well, but the resolution bump might mean you're still seeing same words per line as a mini.

Embraced calibre as organisation tool for the new kobo yesterday too. If I do no side loading except via calibre then I should be ok. The send to device thing knows what's on the device and what isn't unless you start renaming things. But it only seems to be using the filename so doesn't know that the device version is out of date if you, say, change the metadata or the cover.

I've been trying to resolve an issue with Kindle Direct Publishing (they won't ship discounted author copies to Canada because of the pandemic--they will, of course, ship copies bought at full price from the exact same location, about 90 minutes from where I live). From their latest response:

"we are fully aware of this situation and I assure you that is not a situation that can't be forgotten"

I'm sure the double-negative is unintentional and not a sly middle-finger.

two hours getting adobe digital editions onto laptop so i can move away from amazon (the kobo epub shop often echoes the amazon daily and monthly deals, but not always). turns out that stupid windows clock was an hour out because of BST and that was enough to stop registation... (if i'd've left it 8 days it would've worked flawlessly)

first non-amazon ebook purchased and downloaded. it's a faff, twice the faff of amazon. and the formatting inside is terrible, which the amazon preview isn't. all the words are there but paragraphs have a line between them and aren't indented, so conversations run at about 50 words per page.

I usually click on 'buy' and then 'confirm', maybe that's twice the faff of the famed amazon one-click... honestly can't remember the last time I had a formatting issue in the kobo. Persevere!

i'm not loading them directly into kobo, am downloading the ascm(?) link, opening that in adobe whatever to 'fulfil' (download) the actual book, importing that into calibre, and copying that to kobo*.

(* via an sd card, rebooting into linux because none of the above works there, loading said book into linux calibre with all the others, and sending to device, after checking cover image and metdata)

um, was going to say there's probably an option on the convert, but i don't have to convert to epub because it's already an epub.

(it's autumn by ali smith, 99p today only, if you feel like experimenting. it's well reviewed by ilx and features pauline boty)

oh i see (sort of). i never actually look at the kobo store deals, maybe i should. then i could Save on steamy romance with Buy One Get One Free.

xp - that's 99p in the kobo store too!

i got it from the kobo store! as part of the moving away from kindle daily deals. that was the whole point of the exercise! it's native epub and looks worse than the things i convert.

where else is good for buying epubs?

(kobo store does tend to mirror amz deals, but not all of them)

epubs work a lot better on Kobo when converted to "kepub"... there's a way to do it in Calibre automatically when transferring to a Kobo. Makes footnotes and everything work a lot smoother.

kepubs are a step towards a proprietary format though, which is what i'm trying to get away from.

oddly Autumn looks fine in desktop viewer and i've looked at the source and it's all marked up ok, it's just the clara that doesn't like it. it mangles the chapter title pages as well, displaying it like the page is half the size it should be. curious.

Validating against EPUB version 3.0
ERROR: autumn.epub/OPS/nav.xhtml: This file should declare in opf the property: scripted
ERROR: autumn.epub/OPS/nav.xhtml(7,90): 'js/kobo.js': referenced resource missing in the package.

there's a missing file, which seems to be enough to cause it to skip the stylesheet on some readers. it's ok on most things i've tried it on, just not the mini or the clara.

i converted it from epub to epub in calibre and that's cleared it up.

You seem to go to a lot of effort to avoid proprietary file formats of 99p books.

I mean fair play to you but this is why the rest of us go for the lazy option of letting Bezos own the planet.

I'm still not sure why you're not just buying on the kobo, is it to strip drm?

partly (was necessary when converting from kindle books, not so much from now, although i do, because multiple devices / backups). but i don't like syncing my kobo and having them know everything i'm reading (the aforementioned dedrm-ed books, the acres of gutenberg texts), all my bookmarks etc

(my mini wasn't even registered with them initially - i poked a random user id into the sqlite database manually because the registration software only worked with windows)

i do mess with bought books quite a bit, making them more convenient. anna karenina got cut into 8 parts for instance. pretty much everything gets a cover cropped to the correct aspect ratio. les mis(?) had 60 pages of contents because each page of footnotes had it's own entry! and i figure all this is breaking some rule or other.

I’ve bought a bunch of epubs direct from publishers and, depending on how much I care, dump them in either the Kindle app or, more typically, just use my iPad’s default which is just called “Books” now.

My local library has digital lending and the best all-in-one for searching/borrowing/reading is an app called Libby

I've been buying from the Kobo store and reading on the Kobo android app. The formatting kinda sucks compared to the Kindle app, but I've gotten used to it, and it's worth it to be fully off Amazon for me.

Having set all that up I saw something I wanted on Amazon daily deals today and just reflexively hit 'buy now' without checking non-Amazon sources first.

Does anyone have the new, larger Oasis? I have the smaller one from 2016, now falling to pieces, and wondering whether to upgrade (or just read on my phone from now on). I only use it as a night reader when my partner's asleep. One of my hands is semi-paralysed, which is why I prefer it over the Paperwhite.

Sneaky fucking Kindle for PC updated itself despite having updates turned off, so I had to go and find an old version online so I could keep breaking DRM with Calibre.

I religiously keep mine in aeroplane mode now. I have made the same mistake a few times but always manage to forget how I took it back previously and spend a wasted hour or two pissing about with it again!

I have the new Oasis (surprise gift from a housemate as a thank you for walking the dog every day), and I have to admit it is very nice. The bigger screen makes a noticeable difference; when I'm seeing more text at a time, it just seems more like a book. And I like the warm lighting.

Yeah i don't use my Kindle that much but I've been temppted to splash out for the top-tier model, whatever it's called, just for the larger screen. I never take my Kindle out of the house and I always found the small screen size distracting.

Getting a fancy gift as a surprise from a housemate is such a sweet thing!

just done the usual monthly download of ebooks (requires a reboot into windows so it doesn't happen much). 3 bought from kobo, 1 from amazon, but all the kobo books have raggedy right margins 8(

turns out they are all penguins and share similar css

/*
Penguin UK Ebook CSS
DATE: 01/04/2014
version 3.00
*/
p {
	text-align: left;
...

Oryx and Crake had a letter in it towards the end and some of the words were crossed out and looked tiny. i increased the font size and the crossed out words were still tiny. i look at the source and the crossed out words are inlined *images*. cheap ass epub.

current book has about 4 footnotes per page. but they are superscript which increases the line spacing for that line, so 4 times per page you have these horrible extra gaps between the lines of text.

Items Not Yet Indexed

Sometimes I have to delete all of those items from device and then re-download.

person who normally does the Kindle daily deal page must be on holiday.

you'd think it'd be the easiest thing in the world, set a start date and a price and it would just tick over at midnight. recently it hasn't been changing until mid afternoon, yesterday's deals but with their original prices showing instead. somehow today the carousal at the top and the list at the bottom are different (9 in the top list, 6 at the bottom, 3 of which are wrong)

I hate it too. I contacted amazon support about it but I got a form reply that ignored the issue.

Just got an email about this. The Princess Spy.

Truth be told I don’t pay nearly as much attention to this as I used to because for one thing, they list a lot of stuff I am not interested in, for another I already have such a backlog of stuff purchased but unread.

Seems like I passed on some Western-style literary fiction (insert scare-quotes as needed) that was about $5.99 last week and $11.99 this week.

When did they start hyperlinks when book titles appear?

Lemmy: White Line Fever is on sale today but I don’t know if I am up for it

it's odd but i've stumbled across a couple of things recently that've been cheap but not on any of the offers lists.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=wyndham+chaos&i=digital-text&ref=nb_sb_noss

99p there, "Best Price in 30 Days". click through and the red tag disappears. no way of searching on the tag either.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GQ6B6RH72AX8D2TD

The tag is self-descriptive. No idea why the book isn't on any lists. (It's public domain in Canada, under the life+50 rule)

i know, but it's obviously been discounted temporarily but there's no way of seeing a list of them. and they specifically aren't listed in the monthly or daily deals.

life + 75 here iirc, in line with america. but at 99p i'll happily add it to the list