Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Ebook”
A Tip for Reading Manga on the Kobo Clara HD
Recently I got a bunch of manga through a Humble Bundle sale. Having read “authentic” style manga before, the Kobo Clara HD seemed to be about the right size to read manga without having to do any zooming. So, naturally I uploaded the .epub for the Kobo. It was HORRIBLE. It cut off part of the image and made it impossible to read. After a bit of Googling around, I found the suggestion to use the .CBZ file, as the Kobo was capable of reading it. That worked very well. The only real bummer is that it has a margin around the page that makes it just SLIGHTLY reduced in size. It’s not a problem for the text, but some of the fine details can be a little hard to make out. Overall, it worked VERY well and I recommend it as a way to read manga in ebook form (allowing you to carry all of a modest run on your device). (But might not fit all of, say, One Piece or Dragon Ball.)
The Kobo Clara HD
Almost exactly 9 years ago I got a Nook after rethinking my prejudices against ebooks. Four years ago, I started using Calibre to manage my ebooks. Back then I had 324 ebooks. Now I’ve got 1396.
A big difference from 9 years ago is that I don’t use the dedicated ereader as much as I used to. Mostly that comes down to the fact that I don’t read as much before bed and I have limited other places to use the ereader. Usually I’m either reading on my phone or on the computer. But there’s one time that I really love the ereader - when I’m traveling, particularly by plane. This way I can read during the entire trip without draining my cell phone battery. As Scarlett has gotten old enough to read, I figured she could have the Nook (to keep from straining her eyes constantly with the backlit tablet) and I’d still want an ereader for travel. Additionally, who knows - I might go back to more reading at home or before bed when a backlit phone just isn’t ideal. So I got the Kobo Clara HD.
eBook Metadata
Clarkesworld Magazine has wonderful metadata for their issues and anthologies that requires little work from me:
Tor books had an awesome DRM-free policy that I love and that allows me to go to the ebook vendor of my choice. And they give away a free book every month as long as you agree to get some marketing emails from them. But their metadata is not so great:
Come on, Tor! You publish Science Fiction! Let’s get some better metadata on those ebook files!
An Open Plea for Sanity to Amazon and Valve
Dear Amazon and Valve,
I write this to you because you are the largest and most powerful companies in your ecosystems. The digital world has become ridiculous and you need to be leaders in rectifying the situation. Let’s start with Amazon. The two biggest digital things you sell are books and music. Back in the analog world before commerce became a Wonderland distortion, if I bought a book or CD, any member in my household could access this item. It didn’t matter if I bought the book or my wife bought the book. We could both read it. The same went with a CD. Either of us could grab the CD off the shelf and put it into our portable CD player. But now go to the Kindle (or any other e-reader system) and Amazon CloudPlayer. Sure, either of us could pick up the e-reader to read a book. But what if we both want to read a different book at the same time. How can we access each other’s libraries? What about if we each want to listen to the same music library from Amazon CloudPlayer on our smart phones or other devices? For various reasons, like Amazon recommendations, it makes sense for us to have different accounts instead of a family account.
Nook First Look
[caption id=“attachment_3556” align=“aligncenter” width=“450” caption=“Barnes and Noble Nook and the a case for the Nook”] [/caption]
As you may remember, a few months ago I decided to rethink the issue of ebooks. I was going back and forth about buying the Barnes and Noble Nook just before my recent flight to Florida. I had been looking forward to the flight as a chance to read through some of Cory Doctorow’s fiction. In the end, I decided I didn’t want to spend the money on the device and read it on my laptop. This was less than ideal. The laptop only had about 20 minutes of charge on the battery and so I had to split up reading the book between the outbound and inbound trips. Sometime in the near future Danielle and I are going to be taking a much longer flight, so I caved and decided to buy the nook.