Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

This statement in wikipedia has been enough to make me hesitate over getting a Nook Simple Touch:

it has 2 GB of internal memory of which only half is available for content. Of the 1 GB of content, 750 MB is reserved for content from Barnes & Noble's e-book store, which leaves approximately 250 MB for other files

I know why they do this, but I hate them for it already.

I have 70 books on it. I can manage to find something to read whatever my mood. And there's an SD slot if for some reason I wanted it to be my library. That division of memory is entirely irrelevant in practical use.

yeah you need a micro SD card. Then you're golden.

So, it doesn't enforce this 3:1 split on your micro SD? That's good to know. I suppose I could swap books into the internal memory, too. I expect I'll take the ebook reader plunge this year, then.

My rule of thumb is anything bigger than 1 mb goes on the sd card; the rest goes on the internal memory. Like the man said, when you're actually using us there is no distinction between what's sd and what's internal anyway.

Last question: when the sd card is inside its slot, does it tuck in flush with the edge of the reader, or does it stick out at all?

There's a little rubbery door-plug thing that hides the micro sd slot. I haven't had it open up unintentionally at all.

thx

do any of you use overdrive?

the app, the service, the ebook library whatever it is

yeah chicago public library does their e-book stuff through overdrive. probably most public libraries do (though there is more competition now)

uh, oh, another email from nook (who said they'd rejected my card, so i ordered another one from blackwells)

"Dear Valued Customer,

Thank you for your purchase. We want to provide an update on your order.
You should expect to receive your NOOK® Simple Touch within the next 4-5
business days."

and, of course, they send the email with a 'chat to one of our experts' 20 minutes after the helpline closes.

lol me too!

"Dear Valued Customer,

You recently received an email from NOOK customer service indicating that
your NOOK Simple Touch would be shipped shortly.

We apologize for this error but your credit card was not charged as NOOK
Simple Touch is temporarily out of stock..."

THIS IS A SAGA NOW

for charli's questions, i doubt the first one is possible unless kindle has a sort-by-artist-then-date option.

I was using Calibre to get things ready for purchase of Kindle, and it has all sorts of "date sort" and "author sort" fields that I was diligently filling out in advance, but seems the Kindle doesn't give the slightest fuck about them ;_;

i had the same problem with a 13 volume set and ended up putting the volume number in the title, clumsy as that was (but less clumsy than adding the date).

Yeah, I'm doing it with four-five decades each of two prolific authors' work, plus whittling down 280 Doctor Who novels across five different series into a select hundred-odd I want to read in publication order

Nook simple touch has a nice 'shelves' function which is basically playlists of books. One way to address that.

I never understand why anyone shelves things any way other than alphabetical by subject matter irl

Though obviously I have sympathies for shelving autobiographically.

is it still impossible to put pdfs on these

no, i haven't put one on there in forever but i just rightclicked a pdf file and 'send to kindle' was an option (which it isn't for epub files). i'd probably still use calibre or something to format it to mobi though, reading pdfs on kindle was a pain ime.

calibre to convert pdf to a format like epub or mobi works well?

it works. generally not too well, in my experience. Often loses formatting, so page and lie breaks can be a bit odd. still readable, but sure not pretty.

can you put it in your carousel?

You can send PDFs to Amazon and they'll Kindle them for you. I did it once and a couple of small things went wrong but it was pretty good for a free service.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200767360

yeah you just email pdfs to a special address and they show up on your kindle

super easy

for some reason that doesnt work for me

Most of the PDFs I've sent to Kindle have come back a godawful mess, full of random capitalisation problems and usually with things like the left-over title, author and page number in the middle of a sentence.

same here. surely there must be some way of converting a pdf into a usable, if not perfect, mobi/epub file

Calibre has some advanced preferences for conversion that are supposed to help with pdf craziness but I have not figured them out.

I bet if you had Acrobat Pro or Nitro you could convert them to Word, edit them a bit, and get them to convert to mobi pretty nicely.

You can, but it takes a looooong time: you can do a find/replace on the title/author on each page, but I don't know of any easy way to get rid of page numbers.

same here. surely there must be some way of converting a pdf into a usable, if not perfect, mobi/epub file

― NI, Tuesday, May 7, 2013 6:56 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ehhhh they are v. different kinds of files; I can't imagine a conversion being anything better than "adequate" in the best of cases.

it's all text, bro. all it needs is some way of working out what are line breaks and what are end-of-paragraphs, plus yeah getting rid of page numbers, author name etc. it'd never be 100% perfect but i'm sure there's a way of getting it better than the ugly broken mess we get now. (obv the more image-heavy ones like comic strips, textbooks are a different matter but i'm talking about yer bog standard all-text book)

See, that's the thing, a lot of PDFs are not all text. A fair portion are just an image and then a OCR-ed invisible text layer which is what you get when you try highlighting, which is why copy/pasting even from Acrobat Reader is glitchy. Those that are text tend to include the text of everything on the page, including headers/footers, with those sections having no clear way to differentiate them from the content.

I mean, for books distributed as PDF you're unlikely to have the issues with the main body of text, but I was trying to copy from an essay I was reading in PDF the other day and it very clearly was a text layer over an image because the spacing was fucked.

ah ok, wasn't aware of that. main problem im having is the text size - had to ditch more than one pdf book because the text was tiny and unreadable. often get a problem when highlighting & saving text in that it saves either a load of garbled symbols, or different text from a few pages prior. messy.

the text would be scaleable... if it was actually text!

See, that's the thing, a lot of PDFs are not all text. A fair portion are just an image and then a OCR-ed invisible text layer which is what you get when you try highlighting, which is why copy/pasting even from Acrobat Reader is glitchy. Those that are text tend to include the text of everything on the page, including headers/footers, with those sections having no clear way to differentiate them from the content.

Exactly--try downloading a scanned book from the Internet Archive, and then actually cutting and pasting the text: what looks right as an image will be an OCRed garbled nightmare.

a nexus or other small tablet works a lot better if you are going to be reading a lot of pdfs.

yeah i read pdfs most frequently on my phone tbh

all my school reading is jstor pdfs these days and i read them on a galaxy tab

i miss my university jstor sub

it appears I'll be able to continue getting access to stuff w/ my college account in perpetuity, which is delightful.

*posts intranetz emoticon for envious, except he doesn't know it*

(cheap NOOK that i ordered has just shipped. second class post to an office that we leave on friday...)

(it has arrived. am currently paging through the 432 pages of tiny fonted terms and conditions... some of which doesn't render on the device... and also lots of "[hyperlink]" that aren't hyperlinks. last 300 pages appears to be a copy of every open source licence known to man)

i've been loading up a lotta PDFs on my nook but god pdfs are awful in general

PDFs are good for transferring documents that people need to print and where it's essential that formatting and layout are preserved. They're horrible for screen reading unless you're reading on a large desktop display.

Does anyone have any experience of converting between epub/mobi using Calibre? I used it for the first time the other night and the output mobi had a few issues with occasional spaces and periods disappearing. Are there better free alternatives? Is there something I can do to avoid these errors that doesn't require proof-reading?

"Amazon has developed an .epub to .mobi converter called KindleGen[18] (supports IDPF 1.0 and IDPF 2.0 epub format, according to the company)."

.mobi is (like .epub) another wrapped xhtml version, i can't really see how it'd lose information converting from the one to the other.

I assumed the errors were in the conversion and didn't check the epub, I'll have a look when I get home and see if the problem was with the original file.