Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

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