Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

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

Surprised it's PD, since it wasn't published in his lifetime. I thought in those cases it was 50 (or 70, or 75) years from first publication, to stop people cashing in on the work of uni press archivists, etc.

you're right, i didn't know it was posthumous

It's also not very good, all Nazis and UFOs. It's the book he abandoned to take a swerve in style and write Day of the Triffids instead, which was definitely the right move.

slight panic just then when kindle for PC auto-updated to the recent version with the stronger drm. but it didn't stop me uninstalling that and reinstalling a version from about 4 years ago so everything's fine.

i'll get things from kobo as much as possible these days but there were 3 things in the daily deal earlier this month which weren't discounted there.

(the other thing i hasn't noticed before was that kobo site now mixes suggestions into your library - something i looked at last week but didn't purchase was in second slot after the thing i'd just bought)

Today's daily deal section in Canada is entirely romance novels featuring dukes. lol.

i think the uk had that at the weekend.

today i did that click to see details, no response, click again, page eventually refeshes and i've clicked the '1-click' button and bought the thing. it was something i was interested in (Stephen Fry's Troy) and only 99p but annoying and i'd rather have bought it elsewhere.

they're pretty easy to get refunds for. your orders -> return for refund on the right.

yeah, i've done it once before, but probably not worth it just to go buy it elsewhere. how much rocket fuel does the profit on 99p buy?

"The Book Thief: The life-affirming international bestseller as seen on TikTok"

Kindle daily deal today. I've moaned about the crap that they add to titles before, crap which ends up in the title field on the ereader, but this one seems particularly odd. plus it's already been a film.

(the actual tiktok content is stuck behind cookie banners and privacy policy popups but i can see "2.4m views", i guess that's why)

Fuck, that’s grim

they've pretty much abandoned the daily deals, in canada at least. unmaintained page and few hidden gems to rummage for. audible daily deal has had garbage selections for months too, mostly romance novels and YA flops.

seems odd, there are still sidebar links for them, but they just lead to white pages.

can you sensibly use a different amazon? pay by gift card, download for "Kindle for PC" and then remove the drm for local use? kobo.com often echo the amazon deals, albeit as epubs, but again these are breakable and convertable. don't know about region restrictions.

i have looked at kobo canada and that's a ton of no-name sci fi deals. and not all that cheap.

I’ve stopped using my kindle almost completely. I’ve been reading ePubs on Marvin on my phone - usually B-OK bootlegs of books I’ve already bought paper copies of.

I get tinnitus and there was a period where I could only concentrate by using the “karaoke” function on Marvin that flashes words at you one at a time, Parallax View-style. It sounds horrible, but it’s actually quite enjoyable when you get used to it, and I find I can concentrate and read for longer, although it’s much better for simply-written genre books or magazine features than anything complicated.

The Marvin voice-to-text function is also really good. Listening to the app’s female robot voice do “Heartburn” was miles better than the Meryl Streep audiobook - better deadpan comic timing, more Jewish-sounding.

bad: turns out the sci-fi thing i took a punt on last month is part two of two

good: part one turned up as a daily deal today = cheap

bad: the reviews aren't great (of course only people who liked the first one even bought the second one so they skew positive)

and it's 500 pages

don't see it in the deals section but a pushkin-vertigo 4 pack of frederick dard novels is now on sale for under $3
https://www.amazon.com/Authentic-French-Noir-Box-Set-ebook/dp/B0951MZXR4
https://www.amazon.ca/Authentic-French-Noir-Box-Set-ebook/dp/B0951MZXR4

My kobo has replaced the current / total page count with current / total chapter count, which is next to useless. Also the on/off switch is broken but I can switch it on by plugging it in.

should've broken it when they were 20 quid off, just before Christmas.

you can also turn them on by waving a magnet over them - it's how the sleep cover works. top left back seems best on the clara.

as for the count, mine gives me options for setting both header and footer counts. v4.22.15190.

Yes and the footer count is set to current / total pages... will try the magnet trick though.

curious as to whether the new amazon comixology things worked the same way as the text ebooks do i downloaded 49p of random comic and had a go. and it was fine. every page is just the same as the covers on normal ebooks: a div and a JPEG, and coverted to epub perfectly and it's easy to convert from there to cbz

also fixed the problem i had with calibre resizing images too small to be readable - i was using the default kobo settings which are only 400x600px or something

Amazon now shows the size of downloads and some of those 600 page Usagi Yojimbo omnibuses are 1.5GB!

do you… have a script?

it's the same calibre plugin everybody else uses

gotcha

good lord did they fuck up comixology, though. the old app (on iPad, and the web reader) were a lot better, the new website has dead links despite it being new, and I’ve found multiple different ways to view the library, some of which toss you into all kindle purchases, one that shows your comixology purchases, and one that lacks the “from comixology” filter entirely but does include a “comixology unlimited” filter

Chunky is great for iPad + nice developer

the amixology app on my tablet crashes after 5 seconds every time. i have effectively lost all my drm-ed purchases (the old drm-free ones are still downloadable and viewable in any cbr reader, thankfully)

none of the three things that caught my eye from the monthly deals for may seem to have made it across to kobo.com. I'll give it another week.

i have a script now that will scrape the monthly deals into a text file and it's interesting to see how they change from one week to the next.

(two of those now on offer)

does anyone have cataracts and use a backlit kindle and if so how is it? thinking of getting my mum one for Christmas but she has problems with some light sources.

another question, is the a thread for terrible shovelware ebook covers, like this one? i see so many...

https://kbimages1-a.akamaihd.net/a8ed6d40-33af-4baa-b798-ed918cb61d32/353/569/90/False/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-roman-empire-volume-one.jpg