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Dice Dice Baby posted:Because copying instantly reproducible non-rivalrous patterns of ones and zeros is theft as if you stole a car I always thought that libraries were in the "distribution of knowledge" business. I get what you're saying. It's just confusing and frustrating. </rant> Dr. Benway fucked around with this message at 14:31 on Jan 24, 2012 |
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Jan 24, 2012 14:28
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Dr. Benway posted:I always thought that libraries were in the "distribution of knowledge" business. My impression is most of the awful DRM and other restrictions are mostly the fault of the publishers. I do not think Libraries would really go through the trouble themselves if they did not have to. unlawfulsoup fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Jan 24, 2012 |
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Jan 24, 2012 16:50
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Splizwarf posted:
Look at the size of a physical textbook, and then look at the size of your ereader screen. In most cases you will notice a difference. Some textbooks might reflow to the size of the smaller screen very well. Others not. I have three textbooks, this semester, that look absolutely awful on the smaller screen and are near impossible to read without zooming and panning. If I hadn't had to jump through hoops to read the books in an unsupported configuration I might have felt that I was spending money on something that was a really substandard. I'm certain that Amazon thinks many of its customers would also feel this way and would rather have a few people go on internet rants about customer choice and openness rather than devalue its brand.
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Jan 24, 2012 17:26
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They already do that with the magazines and comics they sell for the Kindle. You have to pan and zoom for everything.
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Jan 24, 2012 17:28
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For that matter, why would anyone buy movies on DVD? They don't have a 2 story screen like a theater does. My textbooks need to be panned and zoomed on the PC on a 20-inch screen as well because a lot of the page is gappy white space; the user experience is just as bad as you describe for your tablet and is still the publisher's fault. When a book is lovely as a PDF it's usually because it hasn't been re-edited at all, the Quark documents were just PDFed (usually exported directly from Quark or InDesign via "Save As PDF") without any intercession by someone employed to make it readable. Sorry your experience sucks; all we're trying to say is it's not the only experience, and I think you're being a dick about it. What part of "once the DRM is removed it turns out to be perfectly usable" is hard to understand? v  v
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Jan 24, 2012 18:26
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BlueLaser posted:My impression is most of the awful DRM and other restrictions are mostly the fault of the publishers. I do not think Libraries would really go through the trouble themselves if they did not have to. Point taken. That did cross my mind when I was initially thinking about this, but chose to ignore that thought when making my post. Still, do publishers really think they're loosing out on big bucks for something that people would go through the effort of physically checking out of the library rather than purchase anyway. I don't mind an "expiration date" but a wait list is just plain stupid and the textbook thing is deplorable.
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Jan 24, 2012 20:06
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Dr. Benway posted:I don't mind an "expiration date" but a wait list is just plain stupid and the textbook thing is deplorable. As I understood it, this isn't a thing with an explanation and a reason, it's a blind extension of copyright law. Because X and because Y, therefore Z.
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Jan 24, 2012 20:19
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Splizwarf posted:For that matter, why would anyone buy movies on DVD? They don't have a 2 story screen like a theater does. Because you're sitting a lot closer to the screen and it still fills your field of vision? If you had a 5 inch TV and sat 8 feet away on your couch then it would be a pretty dumb idea to buy a DVD because it would be terrible to watch.
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Jan 24, 2012 20:24
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ZShakespeare posted:Because you're sitting a lot closer to the screen and it still fills your field of vision? If you had a 5 inch TV and sat 8 feet away on your couch then it would be a pretty dumb idea to buy a DVD because it would be terrible to watch.  Seriously, are you just trollin' us at this point? e: ZShakespeare posted:as you attempt to squint at 6.5 pt font and graphics on a small screen designed specifically to display human readable prose? Oh, you are. Ok, nevermind then. Splizwarf fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Jan 24, 2012 |
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Jan 24, 2012 20:28
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Splizwarf posted:
Is it that hard to believe that someone thinks is dumb to complain that publishers are evil for minorly inconveniencing you as you attempt to squint at 6.5 pt font and graphics on a small screen designed specifically to display human readable prose?
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Jan 24, 2012 20:39
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I, for one, regret the lack of effort [some publishers] put into the electronic editions of their textbooks Also: has anyone seen MathML inside an epub? Does it work if converted to mobi?
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Jan 25, 2012 00:22
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Dice Dice Baby posted:I, for one, regret the lack of effort [most Fixed for reality. The number of OCR errors on some eBooks are seriously worse than someone could expect from less legitimate outlets. That's even before you go into proper formatting with things like italics in the right pace, a page not ending mid screen when it's not a chapter break, and hardcoded hyphenations that aren't removed when they make it an ebook. And they have the balls to charge as much as a hardcover.
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Jan 25, 2012 00:48
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New Kindle Touch software is out looks like the main change is that it speeds up page turning and menus, it definitely feels faster and smoother
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Jan 25, 2012 01:56
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mistermojo posted:New Kindle Touch software is out Agreed, worth the update. I am kind of hoping they will enable landscape at some point.
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Jan 25, 2012 02:04
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I've noticed on my Fire that some of the formatting in "Infinite Jest" is really weird. Italics bumping next to the next word, strange formatting, and sometimes wonky footnoting. Luckily it's all text, so I've learned to just ignore these things when they happen.
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Jan 25, 2012 02:33
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If you're complaining about basic OCR and formatting errors in legit copies, complain to Amazon and complain to the publisher. That is bullshit and it shouldn't be showing up. The big publishers I know about take these errors seriously when readers complain.
Anne Whateley fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Jan 25, 2012 |
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Jan 25, 2012 02:53
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i like nice words
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Anne Whateley posted:If you're complaining about basic OCR and formatting errors in legit copies, complain to Amazon and complain to the publisher. That is bullshit and it shouldn't be showing up. The big publishers I know about take these errors seriously when readers complain. Sometime it isn't that easy. For example. I purchased this version of "A Scanner Darkly" early last year. http://www.amazon.com/Scanner-Darkly-Philip-K-Dick/dp/1400096901/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1327456833&sr=8-2 Technically, I bought it from Barnes and Noble because I have a nook, but the books from the different stores are the same. Publisher for the book is listed as Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. As you can see from that link, that edition is no longer sold in eBook form. There's a new one by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt http://www.amazon.com/A-Scanner-Darkly-ebook/dp/B005LVR6NC/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&qid=1327456833&sr=8-4 So, it seems that the eBook rights shifted at some point and Doubleday no longer offers an eBook edition of that book. So, it's unlikely that they would even be able to issue a correction for the many middle of the page hyphenations that are littered throughout the book. The real point is, this poo poo shouldn't be happening in the first place that I would have to go out of my way and complain. If they are going to charge as much for the ebook as a physical copy, they can pay an intern to read the book once and mark down all the places where the OCR fucks up. bull3964 fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Jan 25, 2012 |
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Jan 25, 2012 03:11
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I don't know if this is an OCR error but I bought a Julius Caesar biography on Amazon and each word in the text was spaced way too far apart. It .... looked .... like ..... this (without the ellipses) I tried to mess with the Kindle settings to make it look more normal but I ended up just bitching and Amazon gave me a refund and promised to look into it. That was sometime last year and I just sent myself a sample to see if they fixed it and it's still the same.
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Jan 25, 2012 03:17
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BlueLaser posted:Agreed, worth the update. I'm too lazy to attempt to set up Duokan
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Jan 25, 2012 10:11
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bull3964 posted:The number of OCR errors on some eBooks are seriously worse than someone could expect from less legitimate outlets. In a contrast with most e-book publishers, the people delivering content to the less legitimate outlets often take pride in what they do. They're peer-reviewed and feel like their work is important.
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Jan 25, 2012 14:10
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Lawnie posted:I've noticed on my Fire that some of the formatting in "Infinite Jest" is really weird. Italics bumping next to the next word, strange formatting, and sometimes wonky footnoting. Luckily it's all text, so I've learned to just ignore these things when they happen. For what it's worth, my paperback copy has some wonky formatting issues as well as sections where there are errant carets between letters and stuff. I wonder if those carried over... I have the ebook version, but I haven't actually opened it yet to compare.
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Jan 25, 2012 17:29
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What's the deal with all of the new magazines on the Kindle store now? They only work for the Fire or iPad, although some of those are available on the normal Nook so e-ink versions should exist.
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Jan 26, 2012 09:22
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Original_Z posted:What's the deal with all of the new magazines on the Kindle store now? They only work for the Fire or iPad, although some of those are available on the normal Nook so e-ink versions should exist. Licensing issues I'd guess. I don't like it when I'm surfing the Top 100 list or the Top 100 Free books list in the Kindle store on my Kindle Keyboard and yet there seems to be a bunch of junk in the Free list that is actually Kindle Fire apps or only compatible with the Fire. They need to figure out how to filter that poo poo out.
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Jan 26, 2012 10:02
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Hey all. long-time Kindle fan, first time poster in this here thread. So I've been doing a lot of reading lately and am starting to get a bit tired of the standard Caecilia font that the Kindle 3 sports so beautifully. I love it for a whole lot of things, but something I've realized I enjoy about reading physical books is the differences in typography and how they serve the individual story. I've been doing some serious reading lately (heavy, historical stuff) and the default font doesn't quite serve the text as well as it could for me aesthetically. I know this seems like kind of a dumb thing to say, but hey. I just discovered Calibre's ability to add an alternate font and have been playing around with lots of different serifs trying to find "the one" and haven't had a whole lot of luck finding one that fits the screen quite as well, or is quite as crisp as the default one. Anyone know of any good free fonts that are just begging to be put on an eReader that I could try out? Sorry if this question comes up a lot, I jumped back through a few pages but couldn't really find anything font related and thought you guys might have some good insight.
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Jan 27, 2012 04:03
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Mister Silk posted:Hey all. long-time Kindle fan, first time poster in this here thread. So I've been doing a lot of reading lately and am starting to get a bit tired of the standard Caecilia font that the Kindle 3 sports so beautifully. I love it for a whole lot of things, but something I've realized I enjoy about reading physical books is the differences in typography and how they serve the individual story. I've been doing some serious reading lately (heavy, historical stuff) and the default font doesn't quite serve the text as well as it could for me aesthetically. I know this seems like kind of a dumb thing to say, but hey. I just discovered Calibre's ability to add an alternate font and have been playing around with lots of different serifs trying to find "the one" and haven't had a whole lot of luck finding one that fits the screen quite as well, or is quite as crisp as the default one. Your answer, from here wallcraft posted:The only format that the Kindle supports with embedded fonts is TOPAZ, which is only available via Amazon (no 3rd party tools available). It is a terrible format in many ways, and in particular the embedded fonts are not anti-aliased and so are often very hard to read.
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Jan 27, 2012 04:29
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Is the original font of the print-published version of a book ever noted in the metadata of e-books? It would be neat to be able to at least choose from the same family, or even better the actual font if it was available.
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Jan 27, 2012 04:33
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Dice Dice Baby posted:Your answer, from here That guy's off his rocker, TOPAZ only exists to handle books that publishers don't provide proper digital copies of, not to bloody replace epub. In fact it barely has anything to do with normal ebook formats and is not meant to be used except for aforementioned publisher submissions that are basically just scans of paper books, which TOPAZ allows to have reflow.
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Jan 27, 2012 04:51
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Nexus42 posted:Heads up to Kindle Touch users: I also noticed that it does a full flash every page turn now as opposed to every 5 pages. It's probably too early for any statistics on this, but I assume that it's going to have a notable effect on the battery life? I have had mine since Xmas and I'm just getting around to needing to recharge, so I held off on the update until I had to give it a full charge.
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Jan 28, 2012 04:53
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Alucard posted:I also noticed that it does a full flash every page turn now as opposed to every 5 pages. It's probably too early for any statistics on this, but I assume that it's going to have a notable effect on the battery life? I have had mine since Xmas and I'm just getting around to needing to recharge, so I held off on the update until I had to give it a full charge. That's an odd behavior change, considering the "doesn't flash every page like old e-readers do" element was an advertised selling point.
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Jan 28, 2012 04:58
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Alucard posted:I also noticed that it does a full flash every page turn now as opposed to every 5 pages. It's probably too early for any statistics on this, but I assume that it's going to have a notable effect on the battery life? I have had mine since Xmas and I'm just getting around to needing to recharge, so I held off on the update until I had to give it a full charge. Nothing changed on mine after the update. Go to Menu - Settings - Reading Options and check if the Page Refresh is turned on or off.
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Jan 28, 2012 05:03
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Alucard posted:I also noticed that it does a full flash every page turn now as opposed to every 5 pages. It's probably too early for any statistics on this, but I assume that it's going to have a notable effect on the battery life? I have had mine since Xmas and I'm just getting around to needing to recharge, so I held off on the update until I had to give it a full charge. I don't know if this is the case for the touch, but the non-touch kindle 4 got a software update to make full page refreshing ever page turn an option. You may be able to turn it off.
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Jan 28, 2012 05:46
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Bizarre, I turned it on today to check that setting, it was already off, and now it's not doing it anymore. Maybe it took a while for the update to finish setting up or something... Yes, because I take psychotropic drugs that specifically make me perceive that all eBook page turns result in a full refresh, and I stopped taking them yesterday. VVVVVVVVVVV Alucard fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Jan 28, 2012 |
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Jan 28, 2012 19:14
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Or you were just mistaken.
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Jan 28, 2012 19:26
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The wifi on my Kindle Fire stopped working. I was using the web browser when the connection suddenly stopped working, and now when I go to the wifi toggle it doesn't search for hotspots or do much of anything. There were some people on the Amazon forums who had this problem that said a hard reset fixed it, but none of the steps worked for me. I held the power button down for 20 seconds, 30, a minute, turned it back on, and same problem. I even let the battery drain overnight. Anyone else had this problem? I'm going to try a couple more things but I figure I'll just have to send it back to Amazon, which is just awesome since I'm doing a cross country move tomorrow.
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Jan 30, 2012 17:05
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Got this reply 5 days ago from some Bezos' assistant:quote:Dear TT, It's certainly not much but supposedly it's "being looked into" I guess.
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Feb 1, 2012 06:12
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Totally TWISTED posted:Got this reply 5 days ago from some Bezos' assistant: Thanks for all the info you've put in this thread - it's definitely good to know about all this. As it ended up, only a few of the books I needed were available in electronic editions, so I can comfortably postpone this until next semester, at which time they might have their poo poo a little more together in this area. That's really frustrating, that they sell content that you can't read on their device, really ridiculous.
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Feb 2, 2012 00:18
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Totally TWISTED posted:It's certainly not much but supposedly it's "being looked into" I guess. You'd better believe they're going to fix it. It's one thing if it's an edge case with a few books, but that response makes me think the management knows that the issue really screws with the name brand "Kindle". If anyone cares about my problem with the Kindle Fire, I've determined that the thing is straight-up broken. I imagine it's some issue with their first production run since that seems to be the common link between people who've had the problem and since gotten new Kindles. I imagine Amazon will replace it for me, but I'm in the middle of a 1900 mile drive without one so I'm still pretty pissed that it happened at all.
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Feb 2, 2012 04:12
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Hey nook tablet goons, I've got a question for you. I recently noticed that by the end of the day that my nook is down to like 70-60% after sitting a idle most of the day. I usually turn in on when I get to work so that I can read it when I'm on break and it's usually fine down to about 98-99%. I don't really use the wi-fi unless I download books, so it's constantly off and I do try to plug it when ever I download books. It says that it could last 11 days when the wi-fi isn't on and I'm not getting a full day. What gives? Am I doing something wrong or is it just me?
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Feb 2, 2012 06:37
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Has anyone had problems with Calibre freezing when converting to epub in OSX? It's been happening in about the last few weeks worth of versions. When I do right-click->convert and hit 'ok' it beachballs forever. If I wait a few minutes then force-kill it and restart then the converted books are right were they should be so it isn't that big of a deal, just incredibly inconvenient.
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Feb 4, 2012 05:26
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Kind Touch now shipping internationally! http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Touch-Wi-Fi-Display-international/dp/B005890FUI
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