ebooks | Obligatory Introduction Post

Obligatory Introduction Post

(No, this isn't

efw. Really.)

I've been actively reading ebooks on mobile devices for over three years now. I started on a Clié, which I loved and would still be using if all three of the ones I owned hadn't died. Sony no longer supports it--hadn't supported it for a few years when I first got one--and I collected, and killed, three of them before I gave up on the device. (One dead screen, two with unfixable battery issues.) I wanted to upgrade to a new, better PDA but couldn't wade through the sales hype to figure out which of the eleventy-frak available versions were good ebook readers. They all held the software, but not all were physically designed for easy ebook use--or more importantly, weren't designed for easy ebook use by me.

And I'd been looking more and more at that "e-Ink" stuff, and whined at my husband about my dead Cliés until he bought me a Sony PRS-505. (He said "$300 limit; get whichever one you like." I went crazy reading review sites for a couple of days, and settled on the one that seemed to work best for me.) The PRS wasn't my first choice; the Hanlin was--but I couldn't find out if that was supported in the States at all, and it seemed to be risky for that reason. And it was a very very close choice.

I knew I didn't want a Kindle, because I didn't want to be tied to Amazon for doc conversion; I don't want to email my content to someone else in order to read it. Also, I never quite clicked with the .mobi format; I was fond of ereader. Couldn't afford an iRex, so its features were irrelevant. And I picked the 505 over the 700 for battery life & screen clarity. I've had it for almost six months, and I love it. I take it everywhere, and I read on it constantly. I ignore the Sony store, use Calibre for doc conversion (when I don't use Word to make weird-sized PDFs), and maybe someday I'll figure out that hack that makes the book titles all the same point size in the menus.

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You know what I wish the Sony did? Show the authors names with the titles when you're viewing by date. I was browsing through last night and couldn't remember which of a couple of similarly titled books I had read already because there weren't author names. Otherwise, I really love it. I do the same thing you do with Calibre, although I convert to LRF because I just am not happy with the way pdfs look on the thing. But I've been a pdf hater for a while.

I've worked with PDFs professionally for almost 10 years now; I don't expect anyone to share my obsession with them. I'm fairly quick at setting Word docs to Sony Reader-sized pages, 9pt font, .15" borders, 6pts between paragraphs, so they don't need to reflow when they get there. (Other people would use 10-12-pt fonts. I'll occasionally read letter-sized PDFs without resizing; I prefer smaller text.) Also, I'm pants at working with html, so PDFs are my only way to include images on the few times that matters.

I keep thinking about installing the hack software that lets you customize the Reader interface; I'd love it to have a clock, and have more control over what shows in the various searches. I hate that author doesn't show when viewing by date; I never need to know the exact date I uploaded something, just the order.

And I hate that, after starting to read something sorted by date, if I use the "menu" button to back up, it'll go back to the *author* menu instead of the date menu. Bleh.

Calibre's wonderful, and I need to figure out more of how it works. (Like how to get chapter breaks. I need the newer version, which I haven't downloaded yet, and then need to figure out how to make it recognize chapters. Lack of skill there is probably my #1 reason for making PDFs--I can add bookmarks to PDFs, which translate to a TOC in the Reader.)

I'm slowly but surely learning how to add chapter breaks into the html files I'm making so it's less work. Basically, learning more about Calibre and trying to get it to do most of the work.

I also would love to see author name when sorting by date.

Two Cliés for me - cracked screen did the first one in and failing battery for the other. I really grieved for both of them. I didn't go the Sony or Kindle route because I love reading at night and the reflective screen wouldn't work for me. So I adopted a Palm TX. No complaints but I'm reading on an iTouch (Christmas gift from my husband) now because I thought that I would try to skip ahead on the device learning curve before the technology dumped me on my backside yet again.

eReader works even better on the iTouch (IMO). And aside from a slight concern that someone might peek into my personal content that I have to upload to my eBook account, I'm pretty happy (notes, bookmarks, links to dictionary, customize background and text colors and a healthy choice of fonts...)

But converting doc, txt to pdb... I wish there was an easier, lazy man's one-push button way...

I'd been lusting after an ebook reader for a while when the Kindle came out, so it became my first, and has since been my only for the last few months. I chose it because I didn't know much about Calibre and converting ebooks or anything at the time, and wanted a streamlined solution. Boy has that ever changed--I've been downloading all of my .azw books recently, and researching feverishly about the choices currently on the market. I doubt I'm going to buy anything until late this summer, but I'm really planning to, half because my Kindle's getting moldy, and half because I want an ebook buying solution that doesn't have me shackled to Amazon for most of my legal purchases.

As I understand it, you can use any non-drm'd Mobi ebook on the Kindle, and there are plenty of those. (And Mobi DRM has been cracked, and is easy to remove. And there's ways to set up your Kindle as the registered device for DRM'd mobi books.)

But that doesn't change Amazon's monopolistic practices, and I can understand wanting to explore other options.

Oh, I'll be fine until I make my next purchase. I'm really glad that the DRM I ended up submitting to is a variety that is pretty easy to remove, though I had a few false starts wrestling with Fictionwise at the beginning. Happily, stripping the .azw files of DRM is actually easier than stripping .mobi books from elsewhere, since I don't run into annoying glitches related to the PID anymore.

Cool idea for a community. I haven't bought an ereader yet. I'm on a strict budget. Moreover I want very specific things that aren't available yet or if they are, it costs an arm and a leg and some ovaries.

I want colour. I want to be able to comfortably read comics on an ereader alongside books. Whether or not it plays MP3's or MP4's isn't a priority. I just want something to handle what I read most, which is regular books AND comics/manga.

Everywhere I go these days though, people keep pointing to the iPhone. And I'm very much "The screen is too small and I don't want a Phone. I'm not going to pay for stuff I don't use."

The format wars have also made me raise a brow. And then the whole thing about 'And no PDF's. Now in the name of anything that makes sense to people I don't know. Then again, Foxit is coming out with a PDF reader that costs as much as the other hardware and it also doesn't do colour.

I can handle no flying cars. But no easily accessible portabl reader?

Ever since I saw them in ST:TNG, I thought the PADs they had (Portable Access Devices) were the coolest. Write on them, read on them, have them wirelessly connected to the main computer.... Too COOL!

I'd like to see the Kindle 2 to see if it works, but yeah, just a portable reader would be cool.

That's my tag on my other journal for all my ereader posts. PAD wanted :) Where the hell is it? Seriously.

I'm less inclined towards anything Kindle than I already was after #amazonfail. But I find myself wondering if touchscreen laptop prices might ever go down - plus maybe they could shrink a little too. They have them for truckers etc but nothing for the general public with a public use OS.

There's an e-ink reader that does color. It's less than six months old, only sold in Korea, and it costs more than $800. But I expect the cost will come down as they figure out the tech.

The iPhone is fine for reading novels on, but atrocious for anything with graphics. (For me, anyway. Since I know people who watch movies on an iPod, I suppose a 2" screen for graphics doesn't bother everyone.) We need an ebook reader that can deal with textbooks; that'll be what breaks them into the mainstream markets. Which means it needs to deal with PDFs, no matter how much some ebook fanatics despise them.

I do not get the PDF hate. I just... don't.

I sort-of do. I love PDFs, but I also have several big stompin' programs for working with them, including Acrobat Pro. People who don't, and are stuck trying to read them on ebook readers, hate them. And sometimes even reading them on a regular computer screen is screwy.

Letter-sized PDFs on the e-ink readers are awful. Even the ones that reflow the text have problems; PDFs only reflow well if they were made well in the first place, and a lot of them weren't. Publisher's free promo PDFs are some of the worst. Screwy fonts, oversize pages with crop marks, typographic layout that puts a space between every letter that you can't see in the PDF, but is there if you copy the text into anything else. And there's often no metadata, or utterly useless metadata where the document is called "1135121.x34.cdvs" because that's how their auto-convert program tags it.

But I do get tired of "pdfs are not an ebook format!!!" Because they are. And they're a lot better than, say, TealDoc... it's just that people don't run across hundreds of TealDocs that they want to convert to something else.

I suspect that a lot of the PDF-hate could go away if copyright worries didn't border on psychosis; it'd be easy enough to say "throw a dozen PDFs at me & I'll add the metadata & bookmark them for easy reading"--except that that involves "copies" which are, at best, problematic.

I think my biggest issue with PDF's is they aren't exactly easy to convert to other formats. But I do have adobe acrobat pro at work so that helps alleviate some of the pain whenever I have to deal with them.

All of this, weird shit that happens when you try to convert them and the fact that the DRM is pretty much unbreakable right now from what I heard. I don't like them for reading on a large monitor (whyyyyyyyyy are columns? those only work nicely if they're printed out) and I really hate them on my ereader.

Adobe's DRM has been cracked. (I gather that it can be a pain to remove anyway; I have no idea how to operate python scripts.)

But yeah, overall... PDF was designed as a print-ready format; doing anything but print with it is less-than-optimal use.

Feedbooks.com has free ebooks, and PDF is one of their formats--but they let you set the page size if you want.

I read manga on my Sony PRS it works rather well because manga is already in black and white...now for comics...yeah half the fun of those is the color.

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Obligatory Introduction Post

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PAD wanted

Re: PAD wanted

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