551–560 of 683 posts
If the only thing I care about is speed of page turns, what's my best option? A Kobo device? Colorsoft? Scribe? Paperwhite?
If you need an eReader, something with an LCD screen will refresh faster than something with an eInk display.
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I disagree. It's exploiting a weakness in customer service provision in order to work around built-in UX degradation. Not many people would think of it.
Our society can only exist because people don't push the boundaries of what is technical legal but still harmful to others. There are also many laws you can break without any risk of getting caught. It has to be that way because we can only invest a limited amount of our resources into enforcement of our laws. It's one big prisoner's dilemma where individuals gain by defecting but if too many people defect on the soc…
This is actually a good description the behaviour of megacorps like Amazon. They are constantly looking for new ways to increase and consolidate market share, pushing or breaking the boundaries of anti-trust regulations, at the expense of the consumer.
I wouldn't advocate this sort of behaviour towards individuals or small businesses, only megacorps. Highly dubious that this would actually cause harm to the average person. If anything it would hasten the enshittification process, open the field up to competition, and be a net positive for society.
I am likely coming at this from an entirely different mindset to you. In my mind, the current economic structure implies that sufficiently large corporations are pitched in a battle against ordinary people.
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Its been that way for years, the ad is on the lockscreen, and its an ad for other books. The version with no advertisement is 20$ more, I don't see the problem if someone wants to get a discount for looking at ads.
As far as problems go, I understand it's been a constant and this specific implementation is pretty low on the list, but generally, greed leading to ads intruding every aspect of our lives and people thinking up with new spots to place ads is a problem. Creating a different experience around reading books for those who have and those who have not is also a problem, given how important literacy and the printing press…
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> IMO, the Kindle is the premium e-reader when it comes to look and feel. It's just a fantastic experience. Interestingly, I switched from Kindle to Kobo because it was lacking various basic features that made it not feel premium. * Kobo epubs can show "pages in chapter" progress so I know how much longer there is until a nice stopping point, while Kindle only shows "minutes left in chapter" which is functionally use…
> Kindle only shows "minutes left in chapter" which is functionally useless The kindle recomputes your reading pace as you go, so unless you prefer to do that math in your head and track your own pages-per-minute moving average, I don't see how it's functionally useless
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I will second that the Kobo Libra Colour is an excellent device. To me it's the perfect reading device. To anyone using Calibre with it, make sure you get the Kobo plugin that transforms epub into kepub when sending to device. It normalises text size, margins, and so on so the reading experience is consistent no matter where you uh... procure your library from. I reconvert all my epubs anyway, but that step is critic…
Does the Libra Colour support KOReader? That removes the need to convert to kepub and generally gives you better rendering, at the cost of having to do more setup.
KOReader has some quirks, but Kavita is trying to work around them. Theres a PR for proper syncing so you can read on multiple devices and KOReader doesn't respect the specs for OPDS so doesn't always update after you add books, but it is fixed by a restart of KOReader.
I have a pretty old paperwhite. When it started deleting books i had side-loaded via calibre, I decided to get a kobo. I have a libra color, and I have to say: price notwithstanding, it's a great device. I don't have a lot of experience with more recent devices, but compared to my 2nd gen paperwhite, it is _amazing_. Color is good enough to read comic books on it, the google drive integration means it's not too hard…
I have had many ereaders: several kindles including dx, remarkable 2, kobo clara 2e and the latest is the pocketbook inkpad lite. (all are b/w) Honestly, I just wanted an open reflective reader just for reading. Just put the books on the reader with usb and you're done. I liked the remarkable 2 - they didn't require an account or cloud syncing. I didn't use the pen much, but when I did it was pretty good. I mostly st…
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It's a tough problem to solve and the computation of it all is sufficiently expensive that doing it on a battery-powered device is a significant drain. A further difficulty is the file formats being used --- ages ago, I tried to argue for an ebook format which specifically noted markup and content as being decorative or semantic and looking over the specification I don't see that that was ever really worked up. That…
Is it a tough problem, though? Fonts have hinting built in, executing those bytecode instructions should be something even low-powered chips should do just fine. Text flow algorithms have been solved well since Knuth's TeX work in the 1970s, as I understand it. Obviously, publishers also need to make a better efforts in producing ebooks, but I'm not super familiar with EPUB and don't know where the technology is lack…
- download the text of a book from Project Gutenberg
- work up a set of settings/options for a LaTeX document to typeset it as you wish: https://tug.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/memoir/memman.pdf
- typeset the document, look through each paragraph for bad breaks/poor spacing, and if concerned about a 2-up option, check the page breaks to make sure pages are even, and adjust as necessary
The problem is it's _hard_ to detect bad breaks, and problems such as "stacks"
the instance of the same word appearing at the left or right edge of a paragraph,
the paragraph shown here has a four word stack forced to occur at the left of
the text as currently written when shown at a reasonable width on a display
are very, very hard to address while maintaining even spacing, esp. if the text
is fully justified.
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It's only Kaleido that halves the resolution of colored content. The RM Pro is Gallery 3 and offers full-resolution color.
Though, the RM Pro has 229 ppi vs. the 300ppi for the scribe. So for black and white text, the scribe still has a small edge. But it would of course be cool, if the scribe eventually gets color at 300ppi.
But a bigger difference is that Gallery 3 uses CMYW pigments; there's no black pigment, rather the microcapsules themselves are tinted black on one end, so the black ultimately ends up a little impure. Also there are only 4 shades of grey for antialiasing rather than 16.
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> Kindle only shows "minutes left in chapter" which is functionally useless The kindle recomputes your reading pace as you go, so unless you prefer to do that math in your head and track your own pages-per-minute moving average, I don't see how it's functionally useless
how can it calculate that when I don't turn off the Kindle when I get distracted?
I have a pretty old paperwhite. When it started deleting books i had side-loaded via calibre, I decided to get a kobo. I have a libra color, and I have to say: price notwithstanding, it's a great device. I don't have a lot of experience with more recent devices, but compared to my 2nd gen paperwhite, it is _amazing_. Color is good enough to read comic books on it, the google drive integration means it's not too hard…