The eReader Megathread: Yes, all publishers hate Canada

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > The eReader Megathread: Yes, all publishers hate Canada

Lazyhound: Mar 1, 2004; A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous—got me?

I got the basic, keyboardless Kindle (international version), and I'm pleasantly surprised at how well it handles PDFs. I thought it would dire, based on the the OP and my other research, but even files formatted for letter-size pages are perfectly legible. O'Reilly and Apress books look much better in their original layout than the .mobi versions. My only complaint is that it won't sync / back up last read positions, even if the files are uploaded through PDS.

I really want the cover with light, but $80 shipped?

Lazyhound fucked around with this message at 04:22 on Jan 6, 2012

# ¿ Jan 6, 2012 04:18

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 01:28

Lazyhound: Mar 1, 2004; A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous—got me?

I put together some quick sample shots of PDF ebooks from various technical publishers, because I could never find anything similar when I was doing my buying research:

O'Reilly:

O'Reilly MAKE:

O'Reilly Head First:

Apress:

Pragmatic Programmers:

Generic letter-sized LaTeX document:

The only tweaking required was the contrast level on some of them, which is saved per-file, fortunately.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2012 09:54

Lazyhound: Mar 1, 2004; A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous—got me?

Splizwarf posted:

Which Kindle?

The Kindle 4, though I think they're all using the same screen anyway (apart from the DX).

Sporadic posted:

Why not rotate the screen? Or did they remove that on the cheap Kindle?

Because it's perfectly legible as-is, and I'd rather not have to scroll the page (it is an option, though). The point I'm trying to make is that the blurb in the OP about PDF viewing being terrible is inaccurate or out-of-date.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2012 17:52

Lazyhound: Mar 1, 2004; A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous—got me?

smackfu posted:

So is Harry Potter the only big book series that isn't on kindle?

William Gibson's first two trilogies are missing a title each.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2012 03:39

Lazyhound: Mar 1, 2004; A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous—got me?

Fart of Presto posted:

Which ones are missing? Because all three trilogies are available to me.

Mona Lisa Overdrive and Virtual Light (third book of the Sprawl trilogy and first of the Bridge trilogy, respectively). Not available to me in Canada, and I definitely found reference to their absence when I was trying to figure out :wtc:

after re-reading Neuromancer / Count Zero, so if they're showing up in the US store now, it's a relatively new addition.

e: Yup, MLO was added to the store last April, but gives me a "Not Available in Canada" banner.

Lazyhound fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Feb 26, 2012

# ¿ Feb 26, 2012 20:22

Lazyhound: Mar 1, 2004; A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous—got me?

bionictom posted:

briss?

I wish I'd know this existed before I uploaded all my ebook PDFs to Kindle PDS. :doh:

# ¿ Mar 11, 2012 05:45

Lazyhound: Mar 1, 2004; A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous—got me?

Anyone ever run into a bug with the Kindle where it cuts off the bottom of PDF documents? I'm missing the last two lines on every page of a book. I tried downloading the .mobi version instead, but the original typesetting looks much better.

e: I got around it by manually cropping with Briss, but still, irksome.

Lazyhound fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Mar 20, 2012

# ¿ Mar 20, 2012 15:27

Lazyhound: Mar 1, 2004; A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous—got me?

Dice Dice Baby posted:

Is the PDF k2pdfopt-imized?

Nope.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2012 07:34

Lazyhound: Mar 1, 2004; A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous—got me?

Martytoof posted:

I'd be curious to hear what other Canadian Kindle users are thinking with regards to the Paperwhite and Personal Document Services.

PDS works fine for me in Canada, maybe you're looking at outdated info?

e: gotta refresh those tabs. :doh:

Lazyhound fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Sep 22, 2012

# ¿ Sep 22, 2012 20:29

Lazyhound: Mar 1, 2004; A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous—got me?

Martytoof posted:

That's actually a really good representation of what I'm looking for, thanks! I don't have a PDF sample of the books I'd be reading, but if I come across an excerpt I will certainly post in here and ask for someone to display it.

I posted a bunch of sample shots of books from various tech publishers a while back, if that helps.

Briss is a handy tool for cropping away whitespace, as well.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2012 05:46

Lazyhound: Mar 1, 2004; A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous—got me?

I have a ton of ebooks in multiple formats (PDF/ePub/mobi). Googling suggests that there's no way to mass import/merge them into single book records in Calibre without re-sorting them into a single-title-per-folder directory structure. Did I miss something?

# ¿ Oct 8, 2016 02:47

Lazyhound: Mar 1, 2004; A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous—got me?

fishmech posted:

When you have the same book in multiple formats, it'll attempt to detect this and put say the PDF/ePub/mobi all in the same directory. But this will sometimes fail because they aren't tagged the same. You'll then need to manually merge them in Calibre, but you can do this just by dragging the entries onto each other - they'll be sorted back to a single directory per book.

From testing, the only way I can get it to automatically merge the formats is to use "Add books>Add books from directories, including sub-directories (...assume every ebook file is the same book in a different format)", which would require me to re-sort the books into sub-folders first. Dragging entries to merge doesn't work at all.

SymmetryrtemmyS posted:

When I've had to import multiple formats of the same book (with, crucially, the same title) I've used Find Duplicates to find them, then manually selected each group of duplicates and merged all formats into the same entry with Alt+Shift+M. It will only keep the metadata of the first selected book, which might or might not be relevant to you.

It seems like that's going to be my only option, but it'll be tedious as hell to do it for >100 titles.

edit: I suppose I could write a script to automate the sorting of the books into per-title subfolders, but really this seems like a common-enough scenario that I'm surprised Calibre doesn't handle it more gracefully.

e2: I skimmed over an option in the "Adding books" prefs, auto-merge seems to be mostly working now. Now I just need to figure out how to a) make it do title-only matching b) stop it from renaming the files.

Lazyhound fucked around with this message at 04:45 on Oct 9, 2016

# ¿ Oct 9, 2016 04:02

Lazyhound: Mar 1, 2004; A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous—got me?

Are there any tablet-sized e-ink readers that can connect to a Calibre server?

# ¿ Dec 30, 2020 20:32

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 01:28

Lazyhound: Mar 1, 2004; A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous—got me?

I was holding off on upgrading to a cellular Paperwhite until a new generation dropped. I wonder if they�ll release that later or if they�re moving away from mobile connectivity across the board.

# ¿ Sep 21, 2021 19:00

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > The eReader Megathread: Yes, all publishers hate Canada