Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

not Kindle-specific but adding foreign language reviews of things on Amazon is kind of pointless. it's bad enough they mix reviews of different editions together...

There's a decent selection of non-fiction on sale today. I bought "Fooled By Randomness" and "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire".

I've been using my eReader a lot lately as I tackle a number of books with 500+ pages, tempted by the newer waterproof Kobo models but frankly my ancient Nook with backlight is doing just fine so. That Kobo Aura One limited edition though...

Amazon appears to be tracking every tap on Kindle. I just got my data back and there are 90K rows of this pic.twitter.com/wVCSXCTVwv

— Adrianne Jeffries (@adrjeffries) January 28, 2020

https://onezero.medium.com/kindle-hackers-are-disabling-tracking-and-ads-d00d1ad804b0

after a few months my paperwhite stopped displaying ads as a screensaver. I took it out of aeroplane mode for 2 minutes and am stuck with ads again. I don't particularly want to play Zork but I'm going to jailbreak this fucker if it is the last thing I ever do.

that last firmware update (5.12.3) is fatally unjailbreakable atm :(

Mine's been in airplane mode for about 3 years now

that's the only way to do it. I got a message to turn it off because of some japanese content and it sneaked the latest firmware onto me - fucking scum of the earth amazon!

wtf at the odd little to-and-fro between kindle designer and ilxor near the beginning of this thread.

I paid the twenty bucks to not have ads and I don’t regret it

My kindle died last summer and I replaced it with a Kobo (mostly because this allows me to borrow books from libraries here in Canada) and I have to stay I am very happy with it and seeing stuff like the tweet above just confirms that I made the right decision

Haven't designed any Kindles in a long time, and changed my DN a few years ago, but I'm still around. That back-and-forth was a real bummer at the time though. I was all excited about something I worked on and it felt bad to get shit on over it. Usually I just get ignored!

Hmm, really going to have to look into the Kobo app/store as a replacement for my Kindle app (which I hate myself for loving)

irrefutable

Trump attorney Alan Dershowitz: "If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment." https://t.co/jKErQcS1Iy pic.twitter.com/zo4rL6Zbla

— ABC News (@ABC) January 29, 2020

oops wrong thred

Once my Nooks stop working I'm going for a Kobo, I'm mostly annoyed that I can't customize my wallpapers anymore.

I still don't understand why Amazon don't let you do that on the Kindle.

If the option was to have adverts or pay the extra to remove them AND have the ability to change your screensavers, imagine more people would pay the extra. Seems ridiculous that the only way to do it is to jailbreak your Kindle (if you can)

guess the principle of customer obsession only goes so far after all

idk how much longer it's on for but a whole bunch of Fitzcarraldo Editions books are £2.63 on the Kindle store at the moment.

sorry if this was addressed--couldn't find it on this thread through cmd+f: what are amazonclassics editions? what does "includes editorial revisions" mean? seem to usually be public domain books, i think. i'm wondering if they are abridged in any way.

A bunch of those were made available for free during lockdown recently, but it's not obvious what the revisions are. Easy enough to find out though - compare them against Gutenberg versions. (not easy easy, but possible - convert to epub, strip out all the tags, diff)

But my guess is that Amazon were fed up of the 10,000 other cheap versions of each, figured they'd muscle in.

The cheap Fitzcarraldo editions seems to have been a mistake as they're twice the price today. I bought Axiomatic.

Most of them are £3.95 now

new Kobo

https://www.wired.com/review/kobo-nia/

the words don't really match the 5/10 score.

it's £20 less than the clara HD. still not the 5" thing that would tempt me to ditch my mini though.

"Battery life is only OK"

i need to charge mine for like an hour a month. how is that a burdon?

Bluetooth, no audiobooks, and not waterproof. Typing is so slow that I thought about starting a meditation app while I waited for it to load.

don't know why i would want bluetooth, if i listened to audiobooks i would use my phone. slow typing sounds like it would be a pain... for the less than 5 characters a day on average i type when buying books.

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.