Ebook Readers?

[Lazy Leopard]

...and it's been interesting just how quickly my eBook collection seems to have accumulated. Sure, there was a small matter of a bit of a splurge (taking advantage of the last sale) on eBooks Direct, of course. That accounted for 13 books in total. Then, of course, The Big Meow has been lying around for quite a while, and I also got an early PDF version of A Wind from the South (though I also have that in Lulu paperback form). It turned out I had a selection of books I'd picked up from the Baen free library for my old Palm device a very long time ago. That added 6 more titles. So that's 21 fantasy and SF titles, 20 in an eBook format, and one in PDF. A rummage for other books in PDF format revealed way too many manuals (for radios, cameras, routers, and other such kit) which I decided didn't count because they're most definitely not things one reads as a leisure activity. However, in among those, I turned up copies of three books on Morse code which aren't actually manuals, and might just be read in a leisurely way. So I don't have an eBook reader yet, but there are already 20 eBooks and 4 PDFs waiting to go into one as soon as one arrives...

Edit: ...and I just discovered a copy of "Tomorrow's Songs Today" lurking in my Filk folder, so that's another.

[Kathy Li]

I have a Nook Simple Touch. I don't recommend it. The idiocies of its software are legion, and B&N more and more often proves it has no freaking clue what its customers want. They're elimination of sideloading is probably the most suicidal move I've ever seen from an eBook merchant. My main motivation for getting one was simply to a) NOT get a Kindle and feed the beast of the Amazon monopsony, b) As a former Stanza use, I really like ePub as a format and already had a bunch of 'em, and c) I wanted my indie SF&F bookstore, Mysterious Galaxy, to get a cut when I bought SF&F ebooks (Kobo with IndieBound do this, but Kobo only sells ePubs). It's simply HTML wrapped up in an XML wrapped and zipped, and Sigil gives me authoring capability over files in that format, so I can fix things.

My next reader will probably be the Kobo Aura H20--the water-proof one.

My needs are simple. I need a micro SD card slot so I can sideload a TON of books (because I've sunk probably a thousand bucks into B&N ePubs that I don't want to have to repurchase when I swap platforms)--like my iPod, I want my eReader to have tens of thousands of books on hand that do not require my being network-connected and having ample cloud storage. I'd like a reader that can handle BOTH .epub and .mobi files, as well as .pdfs (WITHOUT reflowing--idiocies of the Nook never cease to amaze me--all my camera manuals were rendered instantly useless by that PDF reading software) and if it could handle .cbz files natively as well, I'd be ever so grateful. .cbz files are the reason I need the micro SD card, because everybody thinks that half a gig or whatever is sufficient library space--which it isn't if you do e-comics. I prefer eInk for the lower power consumption. The Kobo passes on all of these counts, as well as having a back-light, should it be needed. The only feature it doesn't have that I sometimes rely on are physical buttons for page turning.

Despite the fact that my Nook has a touch-screen interface, I do still use the buttons upon occasion. One use is when I stuff it into a ziploc baggie so I can take it into the tub or to the beach . The baggie keeps you from using the touchscreen, so you need an alternate method. The H20 being waterproof should eliminate this requirement, but the other one is when I'm one-handed do to some RSI issues again, so I have to simultaneously hold the reader and turn a page with the same hand. At that point, a button becomes useful, as the gesture stuff becomes less reliable. But I think I might be able to live without if I have to. Which it seems that I do.

The latest iteration of the simple eInk Nook has removed the buttons and the card port, screws up my PDFs, can't do .mobi or .cbz natively (more DRM cracking and Calibre conversion required, which I'd really prefer not doing), only gives you 500MB for sideloading (2GB for B&N purchases)--and they've removed all the "download" buttons on the B&N website and officially discontinued sideloading. In addition, my Nook now logs my keystrokes and then send them all back to B&N so they can see what I've been doing on my device (sigh). So, not the beast for me. They really want me to get one of the color crippled-Android tablet things instead, but I tend to read for eight hours stretches and outdoors with direct sunlight sometimes, and I need more battery life than a tablet provides. Plus, I like that with the eInk Nook, the most frequently I've had to recharge it is once a week.

[Lazy Leopard]

The "re-purchase when you swap platform" problem is one I'd like to avoid, too. The Kobo Aura H2O does look like the best of the available eInk devices at present. I expect that's what I'll end up getting. Cheers.

Edit 1: One is on its way. It seems it has a way to travel, though. From Sheung Shui HK(NT) to Yuen Long HK to Lantau Island HK to Sennan-shi JP to Narita-shi JP to ...

(And there I thought I was ordering it from a UK shop.)

Edit 2: ...Roissy Charles de Gaulle FR

(Closer. Not quite in this country yet, though.)

Edit 3: ... to Stanstead GB

(Yay, it's in this country. Now it's probably going to sit there until the long holiday weekend is over.)

Edit 4: Yep. Definitely not moving from Stanstead for a while, that's for sure.

Edit 5: It sat for a day and a half at Stanstead, then started moving again, and arrived this morning. It is now charging.

[Lazy Leopard]

I got myself a Kobo Aura H2O (thanks, Tuttle & Kathy for the pointers) and it now has a number of books on it, and "Not On My Patch" was a good size to rty it out with.

[Kathy Li]

Congratulations! Hope we didn't steer you wrong!

[Lazy Leopard]

I'm surprised how well it works. In some situations, better than a paperback, and certainly an order of magnitude better than a tablet. No trouble reading books on the train, where a tablet would only be good for fluff like Twitter.

[Lazy Leopard]

A casualty of "Wizards at War"

i guess there was bound to be a glitch or two along the way. All went well until I got to "Wizards at War". Try as I might, I cannot get my Kobo to present it. Sometimes the Kobo locks and needs the reset button pushed. One attempt left me having to do a hard reset the hard way (and then re-load and re-configure everything).

...and it was all going so smoothly.

[The White Falcon]

I have that issue too, you need to manually navigate to page 4 or so, not using the normal page turn buttons. There's some error in the encoding of the book, and since I assume you had a Nook specific version it's probably in all the versions.

[Lazy Leopard]

There being no obviously available generic eBook format, I got the Sony eReader version. Which version did you get?

Edit: ...and following yet another factory reset (because WaW seems to really give this Kobo trouble, and the last lot of trouble seemed to break the Kobo's library index somehow, because Calibre started complaining "DatabaseError: database disk image is malformed"), and the inevitable complete library re-load, and then some careful eBook navigation, I have managed to start reading Wizards at War. There is, very definitely, something decidedly squiffy embedded somewhere between pages 2 and 7, but using the table of contents to get to page 8 allows me to start reading the book itself.

I was also able to page back from there as far as page 5, but pages 2, 3 and 4 seem to be out of bounds.

Interestingly, Calibre also sometimes seems to have trouble getting to pages 2 to 7. You can get there, but not always. I havn't yet figured out what makes the difference, though.

[Kathy Li]

Have you tried cracking it open in Sigil? As long as the ePub is DRM-free, you can actually look at the code in Sigil, and start digging into the guts of the HTML/CSS/XML.

I hate to say this, but some of DD's older ePubs are awfully krufty. Whatever MS Word->Epub translation she was using was just... ick. It looks like with "Lifeboats" that Stross or somebody singing the praises of Scrivener has got her to move from Word to Scrivener (or maybe she just loves IDEs like you do). But Scrivener has its own problems, as I understand it's mostly RTF [headdesk]-based. Still, hella cleaner output than Word for the most part for eBooks.

Because my Nook Simple Touch has THE most brain-damaged default stylesheet of all time (don't get me started), and I really prefer not to root/jailbreak devices, because to me having no root account is a good security measure, I have learned to... ahem... liberate/futureproof my eBooks from DRM (or, better yet, to purchase DRM-free ones in the first place), and then I keep a backup, crack the sucker open, and "fix" the stylesheet and any other weirdnesses I see along the way.

And I've seen a LOT of them. Everything from Kobo books having all the chapters listed in filename order (i.e., Chapter_Eight.xhtml then comes before Chapter_Four.xhtml, and it's a while down the list before you get to Chapter_One.xhtml), B&N Nook Books crashing my reader from being too big (tip: Don't get the four-volume GRRM "Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones" set unless you're prepared to unwrap/breakup the four books into separate epub files), to Harlequins from the early 2000s having all the hyphenation turned into spaces (in tel li gent, nu?) And then there's just the stuff a copy editor would have caught, if anybody still had copy editors. [moan]. Scannos. Man, I really hate scannos.

I do not crack DRM to pirate. I crack DRM to typeset and edit. I know it's completely unfashionable of me, but I like ellipses. I trust the type designer more than the book layout geek, and I will global search'n'substitute  . . .  for … any day of the week. And if it didn't screw up the search capability, I'd use ligatures, too, damnit. Also, as A Chicago Manual of Style girl, it's — with NO SPACES!!!! And italicize trailing punctuation!!!

Yes. Indeed. I've read Robin Williams's (not that one) Beyond the Mac is Not a Typewriter/The Non-Designer's Type Book too many times. Never mind the crazy lady over here.

[Rysade]

Nah, actually that's all fascinating. I've not become involved in the ebook world yet for various reasons (much of it DRM related) and had no idea the 'rabbit hole' went that deep. It's great that you've got the power to format your books how you want them to be.

What would you say is the most 'universal' ebook format?

[Lazy Leopard]

I've not yet looked at how a .epub is actually put together; I've treated it as a black-box up til now. If it's html and style sheets inside then it won't be that unfamiliar. I'll get a copy of Sigil some time and see what can be done. Thanks for the tip.

[Kathy Li]

Nah, actually that's all fascinating. I've not become involved in the ebook world yet for various reasons (much of it DRM related) and had no idea the 'rabbit hole' went that deep. It's great that you've got the power to format your books how you want them to be.

What would you say is the most 'universal' ebook format?

ePub if you mean 'universal' in terms of what can be handed around most easily. Not that there's a standard everyone strictly follows. *headdesk.* Amazon's .mobi is probably the most prolific and popular format, since Amazon controls >80% of the eBook market. Apple's .ibook is their own variant of epub. And .pdf files are in a class by themselves, as Adobe was doing a viewable version of Postscript for much longer than all this HTML stuff. The "ebook" format for comics, CBR & CBZ are simply RARed or zipped collections of image files.

Wikipedia has a pretty decent comparison of document file formats.

I've not yet looked at how a .epub is actually put together; I've treated it as a black-box up til now. If it's html and style sheets inside then it won't be that unfamiliar. I'll get a copy of Sigil some time and see what can be done. Thanks for the tip.

No worries. Basically, if you have a DRM-free epub, and simply change the .epub to .zip, and unzip it, you'll see all the files.*

Sigil just makes it easier to keep it all stored in the .epub file while you play with it. It also will automatically update the XML wrapper file (content.opf) that catalogs the contents of the file, as you edit/rename/delete/add/recharacterize them. You can characterize a page to be the cover, title page, dedication, etc. etc. by simply rightclicking on the file, and designating it. And you can also (re)generate a table of contents from heading tags.

*trivia note. Zipped XML or zipped HTML/CSS with an XML wrapper seems to be the default format for nearly any type of document file these days. The OpenOffice/LibreOffice .odt file format is simply zipped XML. And the old Microsoft .CHM help files were pretty much the same. Ditto Eclipse Help modules. As a professional techwriter, I've run into a lot of electronic document formats. Too many "orphaned" binary file formats over the decades have taught folks to make their new file formats a little more future proof and standards-adhering. The only real exception is the lingua franca of electronic documents in the business world: the Microsoft Word .DOC format.