Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

yeah, just those two (same deal at Argos). they had Black Friday deals on the crazy expensive ones and the clara h2o thing (recycled plastic, waterproof, more money) but i think the vanilla claras have been replaced by those (although they have a refurbished one)

the nia has arrived (argos do overnight delivery to a checkpoint 10 minutes away. first time i've used one. it's just a kiosk inside a sainsburys local and you enter your order number and name but it seems to rely on a staff member noticing you hanging around)

the plastic feels a bit more plasticky and the on/off/sleep button is inset a lot more than my clara, to the point where you need to use a fingernail and which makes it easy to turn it off when you want sleep. new firmware as well by the look, and the fonts seem to start a lot smaller than mine. lower resolution is noticeable if you're used to the hd clara but doesn't look too bad (it's worse whilst changing pages, but then it settles and looks no worse than some books i have)

the bit i do like is that the logo on the front is now embossed and not printed (i had to go over mine with a sharpee because it was a bit too white)

was £70 on offer, down from £90. my clara was also 20 quid off the original price when i bought it, £80 i think, but they went up and then got replaced by the recycled plastic / audiobook thing. the nia's not great but i'm not sure i'd pay the extra £60 to get the clara e2

(looks like the other non-kindle alternatives could be the newer nooks and the pocketbook range. only links to the nook i can find go to amazon that just seems to show me random stuff.)

I've ordered a nia, the £60 saving (compared to the clara) was an offer I couldn't refuse. I'm not sure what our previous models are - touch or aura I guess - I got two new for £100 after they'd been superseded by the clara. what I like about them, just aesthetically not functionally, is that the screen is not inset, the whole front is a single smooth surface.

I was reading a book and as soon as I got to the acknowledgements, Kindle popped up the "rate this book! Read this next!" thing. I was so mad.

gah. bought actual official penguin classic version of Notre-Dame de Paris and it's full of typesetting badness. have seen the following several times:

‘some speech’, and then,’ some more speech’

where the third apostrophe is also the wrong shape, a 9 rather than a 6.

épice appears as ¿pice in the footnotes

and generally the footnotes are per-page, and each has its own entry in the toc, meaning the toc is 18 pages long and, of course, the ebook pages aren't the same as the original's so the numbers are pointless. the footnote markers are also superscript leading to a bigger line gap on the lines where they appear.

(all of this fixable locally but annoying)

> I've ordered a nia
> ledge

how are you finding it?

It's my wife's, I haven't used it myself but she's perfectly happy with it. I'll try and have a go with it later.

https://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2022/03/22/how-collections-work-after-latest-kindle-update/

Anyone had any luck trying KOReader on the Kindle?

reading Jennifer Saint's Ariadne. but they've hard-coded the font (Sabon LT) and it's very spindly especially on a backlit screen. but i have an editor, i can change that...

20 different 'txt' styles and it's specified in every single one. the C in CSS is for cascading. also fixed the first-line-indent which was way too low. and added a margin before the sections. does nobody ever read these things?

(what's bigger than a paragraph? new paragraphs are indented by a character or two but there's no gap above them. but once in a while, one a major change of subject, there'll be a one-line gap and the next paragraph will be hard to the left. is there a name for this? section?)

CARELLA: What made you cnoindente your mind?
PATRICIA: I cnoindented my mind, that’s right.

took me a while to work out what was happening here. i wonder if the original kindle version was correct?

noindent whoever came up with that find & replace.

it's that time again...

just went to download recent purchases and it's forcing me to upgrade Kindle for PC version, which means more reading around on how to break the d r m. only out £1.99 of this doesn't work but it's annoying.

new plugin needs new calibre...

Crosspost with backward steps I guess but it’s bananas that you can find the kindle edition of a book in the Amazon app & it says “This app does not support purchasing. Books purchased through Amazon are available in the kindle app.” & the kindle app itself has the same message. My gut response is always fuck you then, if I’m doing any extra steps it’ll be to get it on l1bg3n

I was happy to find that Zlibrary is still going, though I had to install Tor to access it. Probably the closest I've ever got to using "dark web"!

Wins I think it’s because Amazon doesn’t want Apple to take a cut of every book purchase, so you have to use the Amazon website to buy ebooks.

Confirming my gut response tbh, if the two omnipresent dystopian tech giants can’t come to slight compromise in the name of usability fuck em

it's the payments thing, but also that apple has their own competing book store

new Kobos

updated waterproof clara with bluetooth audio and dark mode (same price iirc)
https://uk.kobobooks.com/collections/ereaders/products/kobo-clara-bw

also with colour eink (20 quid more)
https://uk.kobobooks.com/collections/ereaders/products/kobo-clara-colour

both with recycled plastic covers

in other news, the biography of thomas hardy i am currently reading has a thing where none of the words ending in "x" have the following space. "Sixmen", "Foxand", "boxand"...

I was happy to find that Zlibrary is still going, though I had to install Tor to access it. Probably the closest I've ever got to using "dark web"!

annas-archive.org is still going - tor unnecessary

got fed up of the lack of covers on penguin classics - sometimes they don't include them, if they do they are the wrong shape for my 3:4 ereader. so wrote something that'll let me generate them using a 600x600 image and mocking the rest. and it lets me do crap like this

http://www.koogy.clara.co.uk/feersum.jpg

(there are other generators out there if you search, that's where i got the font details from, but they maintain the aspect ratio and that's exactly what i needed to change)

zlib doesn't need Tor anymore, apart from a few books that have had requests to be removed, which are now only on tor

xp image opens in flagging, doesn't show for me on the web for some reason. anyway, nice :)

(it's linked from my personal webspace rather than, say, imgur. i do worry about that image being downloaded everytime someone views this page, but hey, it's what web servers are for)

that’s awesome, koogs

Has anyone tried the Boox Palma some people are now raving about? The phone format is both tempting and worrying

https://shop.boox.com/products/palma

um, in two minds about that. it looks ok of itself, but it's an even worse aspect ratio (imo) than the kobo (which is a touch shorter than a book). it's also twice what i'd want to pay (probably because of a pointless camera and microphone)

824 x 1648 (300ppi, 1:2) palma
vs
1072 x 1448 (300ppi, 6:8) clara

Why not just make an actual e-ink phone if you're going to do that?

i'd love to see the super refresh (you can watch videos on it!) but yeah not sure what market / purpose they're going for, it's obviously way overspecced (and small) for an ereader.

they quote a bigger diagonal screen size than the clara but that aspect ratio skews things

I could see the appeal of an e-ink phone (especially if it means that the battery life is significantly longer, not sure about that though).

I feel like somebody who wants something more portable to do their reading is just going to use their actual phone rather than carry around two similarly sized devices even if the phone screen isn't quite as good for reading as e-ink is.

xxp to myself

Might be worth watching this video on an e-ink monitor before committing to the phone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZXrJRpA0Jw

As a fortysomething with increasingly iffy vision, I don't find e-ink noticeably better than reading on my phone - my Kindle still looks a bit sparkly and overly-contrasty, even though it's noticeably better than a phone on a sunny day. But my impression is that the resolution/DPI of the text itself is still pretty poor even on the most recent e-ink readers.

Chief benefits of the Kindle for me are:
-- Reading big Victorian novels is a bit easier on my back than carrying a big Victorian novel
-- Every non-reading experience on the Kindle is bad, which keeps me focused on reading
-- Useful on holidays and stops me packing 8 books in a suitcase

But I don't find the letter-and-sentence-reading experience itself any better

plus:
-- you can fall asleep whilst reading without creasing pages / facial papercuts
-- backlight means you don't need the main bedroom light on / can read between bands
-- ebooks are cheaper / free

minus:
-- ocr errors
-- amazon drm / hegemony

plus:
-- choice of fonts (serif for victorian novels, sans for sci fi) / text size

-- Every non-reading experience on the Kindle is bad, which keeps me focused on reading

Btw, this would basically be the main positive of an e-ink phone. Much like the reason why I am sometimes tempted to just buy a flip phone it would prevent me from wasting time doing dumb shit.