Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

Actually, just paid ones will suffice - after three minutes looking at these things all the 'free' ones are cancer

My 11-year-old played Geometry Dash from about age 7 until now.

Since this thread is bumped, just curious... is kobo still in business?

twitter feed sez so

I've recently read a few ebooks on my phone, can't really see myself buying a Kobo or similar ebook reader - phone did a pretty good job imo, and I almost always have it on me, very easy to sync etc

In space, pizza sends out for YOU (Ste) at 11:59 24 Dec 17

Actually, just paid ones will suffice - after three minutes looking at these things all the 'free' ones are cancer

Okay that is actually quite cool. cheers

I knew nothing about this but seems all is not well in the world of Kindle Unlimited.

From another forum:

There are massive goings-on in publishing atm. As a reader, you may not think this affects you, but it does - it's turning the bestseller charts into complete nonsense.

It all kicked off with #Cockygate - where one romance author called Faleena Hopkins trademarked the word 'cocky' and then started issuing cease & desist letters to any author using the word, plus contacted Amazon and others instructing them to remove the books due to trademark infringement, then attempted to get a restraining order against those protesting. Others have followed suit and tried trademarking other, common words - 'Dragon Slayer' being one.

While this went on, #Tiffanygate emerged - an author called Chance Carter offering jewellery to anyone leaving reviews for his books. This is totally against Amazon's T&Cs, and something they've been feebly trying to clamp down on. He was revealed as a 'book stuffer', and that's when things really kicked off.

The route of most of the scams is Kindle Unlimited - where the reader pays a monthly subscription to access or 'borrow' over a million books. The money went into a pot out of which Amazon paid out per book purchased. Which meant that books of 100,000 words or 100 words earned exactly the same.

Strangely, some really, really short books popped up. Single novels were chopped down to a-book-per-chapter.

In order to stop the scammers, Amazon changed their payment system to per page read.

The scammers then inserted dodgy links and gobbledegook into the 'books' to increase their payout.

Amazon did the bare minimum to stop this.

In response, the scammers starting stuffing their books with extra books, some previously published, some bought from ghostwriters, and instructed their followers to flick through all of these. Explained here, but there could be up to twenty or more in there.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DfTLKp1U0AAvZSB.jpg:large

They also paid them to leave gushing reviews, using the massive payouts they were receiving from KU and from being 'All Stars' for being so popular. B-|

How does this affect the reader - they get free books? Several ways:
- the stuffed books are usually low quality and poorly edited, if at all.
- the Top 100 charts are so full of bookstuffers, that genuine authors aren't visible (Amazon's algorithms ensure KU books have higher visibility).
- most of the scammers aren't who they say they are (e.g. Santino Hassell, supposedly a gay male from a troubled background who was actually a middle-class couple), and there's been some really awful disclosure of personal details and doxxing of those who've tried to uncover the scams. Men pretending to be women asking for details of how their followers lost their virginity. Really creepy stuff.
- for greater visibility, these books also pop up in every possible genre. They're everywhere.
- many popular authors have had enough of their payouts dropping so have withdrawn their books from KU. Bookstuffers take their places. And so on.

Therefore, the reader suffers too.

There's a summary of the above here, showing how it's been polluting the romance genre, though it's believed it's affecting others:

davidgaughran.com/2018/06/02/cockygate-faleena-hopkins-tiffanygate-chance-carter/

(btw, the transcript of the first court case is hilarious in parts)

More detail about KU and the scams here: chrisalmeida-ceciliaaubrey.com/288-getloud-and-stayloud

And what are Amazon doing? Very little. It's not affected their bottom line as they're not seeing the readers' frustration. Authors have tried complaining, but they do nothing. A few scammers have been hit, but they have masses of different names and accounts. A load of reviewers and bloggers have been hit, but none of the main offenders, and lots of innocents have been dragged in, their reviews deleted and accounts closed.

Amazon have confirmed that 10% or less should be material not part of the book. In response, the scammers are now calling their books, 'compilations'. This is still not permitted as the books are duplicated elsewhere, but muddies the waters enough.

It's a fucking mess.

Anyway, if you're reading digital books and you come across anything that doesn't look right, report it to the bookseller. Report it here. Don't just think how weird it is and ignore it - that's what I did before I understood how the scam works.
If there's a book in the wrong category, report it.
If there's suspicious reviews, report it.
Review the books you read, and try to do it truthfully - reviews are appreciated and the real ones are easy to spot.
And don't rely on the bestseller charts - if scammers haven't manipulated them, publishers or booksellers will have.

If they're shitty, unedited books, who are their followers that page through the books to build their numbers?

is KU part of Prime? i imagine there are people with Prime that don't care about KU but will flick through books once a month for a bit of payback.

No, it’s separate from prime

I’m using my free month atm, found a few things to read but am definitely cancelling before I get charged cause, yep, it’s almost impossible to find real books among the garbage

who

i mean who really

decides to read a book based on amazon reviews

let alone a self published book

The one thing reviews can be good for is alerting you to things like bad scans, dodgy translations &c

Kindle Unlimited and Amazon Prime both have awful selections, the real dregs of genre and self-publishing.

The Unlimited model is basic Heroin Economics - you get the first or second part of a series for free, then the rest are in the paid section.

I use my Kindle all the time, but I rarely buy books now - I use the Kindle Oasis as my "lights off" book when my partner wants to go to sleep. I buy the print copy, find the EPUB online, and convert it with Calibre. Also helpful for reading on your phone at the office.

pro-tip: turn the tables and scam the writers by leeching all yr e-books from the likes of 8okosZ1!

can't always find the books i want via "free" EPUB or MOBI so i've been buying stuff this year. the proofreading/conversion/whatever can be pretty lousy considering i'm paying for them, but then my experience of print books over the last 10 years hasn't been lots better. still aggravating that an allegedly full price ebook can fail terribly on functional footnotes, formatting etc. i am more or less fully converted to the Kindle now after years of holding out tho. just wish there was a sensibly priced/sized pdf reader out there.

I managed to get a 2nd hand Kobo aura for 30 odd quid a few years back. I try not to deal with PDF's, but I think it is rated as a very decent PDF reader.

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.