OT: I got a Kindle! ...So what do I do?

[Robert Carnegie]

I got a birthday present of a Kindle! Model SY69JL
("Generation 8" apparently); I read that it has wi-fi
and has a screen read-out-er that operates over Bluetooth,
although it doesn't do audio playback (?)

So! What should I want to do now, with it? And what
will I not want to do? Is there a good guide?

I don't particularly want to read "pirated" books.
But I don't want to be limited as to what e-books
I can buy and/or use.

Maybe I should try it out on tongue twisters like
"The Leith police dismisseth us" or "Cimmerian barbarian".

[Moriarty]

Post by Robert Carnegie
I got a birthday present of a Kindle! Model SY69JL
("Generation 8" apparently); I read that it has wi-fi
and has a screen read-out-er that operates over Bluetooth,
although it doesn't do audio playback (?)
So! What should I want to do now, with it? And what
will I not want to do? Is there a good guide?
I don't particularly want to read "pirated" books.
But I don't want to be limited as to what e-books
I can buy and/or use.
Maybe I should try it out on tongue twisters like
"The Leith police dismisseth us" or "Cimmerian barbarian".

First, download calibre and use it as a library and to transfer stuff on and off your kindle. If you don't want the books you buy to have DRM, install the calibre de-DRM plug in.

After that, cruise websites and trawl up all the free ebooks that you want. Project Gutenberg has some early SF by e.g. Doc Smith and Murray Leinster. It also has pretty much anything you want by any remotely famous 19th century author. Want the complete works of Verne, Dumas, Dickens, Austen, Twain or Dostoyevsky? It's all there.

Then surf through Amazon's kindle store. They have an amazing amount of free or almost free stuff. E.g. they've published a number of "Science Fiction Megapacks", mostly for less than a dollar. Look at this one:

https://www.amazon.com/Second-Science-Fiction-Megapack-ebook/dp/B005MPYQMQ/ref=sr_1_3?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1532649875&sr=1-3&keywords=science+fiction+megapack

Stories by Fritz Lieber, Cyril Kornbluth, Alfred Bester, our own Lawrence Watt-Evans, Murray Leinster, PK Dick, Henry Kuttner, Frank Belknap Long, James Blish... There must be something in there you'll like and all for 69 cents!

Then read some of it.

-Moriarty

[James Nicoll]

Post by Robert Carnegie
I got a birthday present of a Kindle! Model SY69JL
("Generation 8" apparently); I read that it has wi-fi
and has a screen read-out-er that operates over Bluetooth,
although it doesn't do audio playback (?)
So! What should I want to do now, with it? And what
will I not want to do? Is there a good guide?
I don't particularly want to read "pirated" books.
But I don't want to be limited as to what e-books
I can buy and/or use.

Assuming you have a laptop or desk top computer:

DOwnload Calibre, which is an ebook management system. Among other things,
it will let you convert from other formats to mobi,which is I think
what Kindles use. Then go wild on legal free sites like project
Gutenberg.

[Ted Nolan <tednolan>]

Post by James Nicoll

Post by Robert Carnegie
I got a birthday present of a Kindle! Model SY69JL
("Generation 8" apparently); I read that it has wi-fi
and has a screen read-out-er that operates over Bluetooth,
although it doesn't do audio playback (?)
So! What should I want to do now, with it? And what
will I not want to do? Is there a good guide?
I don't particularly want to read "pirated" books.
But I don't want to be limited as to what e-books
I can buy and/or use.

DOwnload Calibre, which is an ebook management system. Among other things,
it will let you convert from other formats to mobi,which is I think
what Kindles use. Then go wild on legal free sites like project
Gutenberg.

Project Gutenberg already has mobi format books. Calibre is a neat tool,
but there is no point staging PG books through it.

[Ted Nolan <tednolan>]

Post by Robert Carnegie
I got a birthday present of a Kindle! Model SY69JL
("Generation 8" apparently); I read that it has wi-fi
and has a screen read-out-er that operates over Bluetooth,
although it doesn't do audio playback (?)
So! What should I want to do now, with it? And what
will I not want to do? Is there a good guide?

There should be a guide to your kindle .. on your kindle.

Your model supports the formats AZW3, AZw & MOBI. Anything you download
in these formats will work if it is not encrypted. Public domain books will
not be encrypted; books you buy from Amazon usually will be.

The main sources of public domain books are Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org)
and the Internet Archive at archive.org. You will also find them on authors'
sites.

Or, of course, you could buy them from Amazon via the convenient menu built
into your kindle.

[unknown]

Post by Ted Nolan <tednolan>

Post by Robert Carnegie
I got a birthday present of a Kindle! Model SY69JL
("Generation 8" apparently); I read that it has wi-fi
and has a screen read-out-er that operates over Bluetooth,
although it doesn't do audio playback (?)
So! What should I want to do now, with it? And what
will I not want to do? Is there a good guide?

There should be a guide to your kindle .. on your kindle.
Your model supports the formats AZW3, AZw & MOBI. Anything you download
in these formats will work if it is not encrypted. Public domain books will
not be encrypted; books you buy from Amazon usually will be.

Amazon also fo .KFX and other .KF? On a Kindle they will work if
encrypted as tied to your amazoin login via the Kindle or Kindle apps.
Amazon books encryption depends on teh publisher thus TOR and Baen and
others books are not encrypted.

Post by Ted Nolan <tednolan>
The main sources of public domain books are Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org)
and the Internet Archive at archive.org. You will also find them on authors'
sites.
Or, of course, you could buy them from Amazon via the convenient menu built
into your kindle.

[Greg Goss]

Post by Ted Nolan <tednolan>

Post by Robert Carnegie
I got a birthday present of a Kindle! Model SY69JL
("Generation 8" apparently); I read that it has wi-fi
and has a screen read-out-er that operates over Bluetooth,
although it doesn't do audio playback (?)
So! What should I want to do now, with it? And what
will I not want to do? Is there a good guide?

There should be a guide to your kindle .. on your kindle.
Your model supports the formats AZW3, AZw & MOBI. Anything you download
in these formats will work if it is not encrypted. Public domain books will
not be encrypted; books you buy from Amazon usually will be.
The main sources of public domain books are Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org)
and the Internet Archive at archive.org. You will also find them on authors'
sites.
Or, of course, you could buy them from Amazon via the convenient menu built
into your kindle.

If you're into SF, Baen never encrypts the stuff the sell on their own
site. I dunno if their stuff on Amazon gets encrypted.

They also have a huge "free library" of slightly older works in
various serieses or less famous authors, to tease you into buying
newer stuff.

They also (used to?) include a sampler CD in each hardcover edition.
These samplers include some "teaser" material that isn't in their free
library. I've seen this CD still in place in at least one library
book. They used to turn a deliberate blind eye to archiving these
sampler CDs on sites like Fifth Imperium. I don't know if they still
do, nor whether authors think sites like 5I are piracy or libraries.

[-dsr-]

Post by Greg Goss
If you're into SF, Baen never encrypts the stuff the sell on their own
site. I dunno if their stuff on Amazon gets encrypted.
They also have a huge "free library" of slightly older works in
various serieses or less famous authors, to tease you into buying
newer stuff.
They also (used to?) include a sampler CD in each hardcover edition.
These samplers include some "teaser" material that isn't in their free
library. I've seen this CD still in place in at least one library
book. They used to turn a deliberate blind eye to archiving these
sampler CDs on sites like Fifth Imperium. I don't know if they still
do, nor whether authors think sites like 5I are piracy or libraries.

They haven't, for a while.

At one point they included all of the Vorkosigan novels to date* on a CD
-- possibly without clearing it with Ms. Bujold. Baen asked the sites
that mirrored the CD to stop doing so about a year after publication,
and I believe they generally complied. However, once data is published
under a permissive license, it remains that way.

*Through Cryoburn, except Memory.

The intro to the CD said "What’s the catch? This disk and its contents
may be copied and shared, but NOT sold. All commercial rights are
reserved. That’s it." Pretty similar to one of the Creative Commons
licenses.

Other than that, it's not piracy, it's a repository.

-dsr-

[1***@compuserve.com]

Post by Ted Nolan <tednolan>

Post by Robert Carnegie
I got a birthday present of a Kindle! Model SY69JL
("Generation 8" apparently); I read that it has wi-fi
and has a screen read-out-er that operates over Bluetooth,
although it doesn't do audio playback (?)
So! What should I want to do now, with it? And what
will I not want to do? Is there a good guide?

There should be a guide to your kindle .. on your kindle.
Your model supports the formats AZW3, AZw & MOBI. Anything you download
in these formats will work if it is not encrypted. Public domain books will
not be encrypted; books you buy from Amazon usually will be.

I have an older model, but surely the newer ones also still support .txt files too? My paperwhite actually supports simple html tags in .txt files (but only simple stuff, so just renaming a .html file to .txt rarely works). Strangely, it simply rejects any file with the .htm or .html extensions.

It also supports extended characters sets in these .txt files. I'm reading Le Mort d'Arthur in Middle English and my Kindle's got no problem with "þt knyȝt".

JimboCat

[Jay E. Morris]

Post by Robert Carnegie
I got a birthday present of a Kindle! Model SY69JL
("Generation 8" apparently); I read that it has wi-fi
and has a screen read-out-er that operates over Bluetooth,
although it doesn't do audio playback (?)
So! What should I want to do now, with it? And what
will I not want to do? Is there a good guide?
I don't particularly want to read "pirated" books.
But I don't want to be limited as to what e-books
I can buy and/or use.
Maybe I should try it out on tongue twisters like
"The Leith police dismisseth us" or "Cimmerian barbarian".

If you're not familiar with bookbub.com they list free and low cost
books available on several platforms. Also have a daily email for the
genres you're interested in.

[Titus G]

Post by Robert Carnegie
I got a birthday present of a Kindle! Model SY69JL
("Generation 8" apparently); I read that it has wi-fi
and has a screen read-out-er that operates over Bluetooth,
although it doesn't do audio playback (?)
So! What should I want to do now, with it? And what
will I not want to do? Is there a good guide?

Read books on it.

Don't try it out on tongue twisters like "The Leith police dismisseth
us" or "Cimmerian barbarian" because this activates a software switch
which blanks out the last page of randomly chosen unread books.

The User Guide is fine.

Post by Robert Carnegie
I don't particularly want to read "pirated" books.
But I don't want to be limited as to what e-books
I can buy and/or use.
Maybe I should try it out on tongue twisters like
"The Leith police dismisseth us" or "Cimmerian barbarian".

I am a Calibre fan as well.
I use the free Amazon software, "Kindle for PC" and buy books using that
software and have never registered a Kindle. I transfer them and
downloads from Gutenberg etc to the Kindle from the free library
management program Calibre which is brilliant and makes managing your
Kindle content so much easier and quicker.

I recommend that you tap the Home icon before switching off rather than
switch off at the page you are reading: in my early days of Kindle
reading, I forgot both book and author names whilst reading because I
wasn't looking at a cover every session as with a paperback.

[m***@sky.com]

Post by Robert Carnegie
I got a birthday present of a Kindle! Model SY69JL
("Generation 8" apparently); I read that it has wi-fi
and has a screen read-out-er that operates over Bluetooth,
although it doesn't do audio playback (?)
So! What should I want to do now, with it? And what
will I not want to do? Is there a good guide?
I don't particularly want to read "pirated" books.
But I don't want to be limited as to what e-books
I can buy and/or use.
Maybe I should try it out on tongue twisters like
"The Leith police dismisseth us" or "Cimmerian barbarian".

I have an old Kindle which will handle .txt files, and which appears as a USB drive when plugged in to a computer. Stuff that I download from Project Gutenberg or buy from Baen I turn into .txt and copy to the documents folder of the Kindle. Sometimes that garbles a few non-ascii characters, but I usually don't care about that (It did become slightly irritating with "Mission to Methone" where the e is non-ascii due to an accent). I don't know how much of this works with a Generation 8 Kindle, but I'd be interested to know, because sooner or later my old Kindle will die.

(I do buy stuff from Amazon - I just don't want to be limited to that)

[Ted Nolan <tednolan>]

Post by m***@sky.com

Post by Robert Carnegie
I got a birthday present of a Kindle! Model SY69JL
("Generation 8" apparently); I read that it has wi-fi
and has a screen read-out-er that operates over Bluetooth,
although it doesn't do audio playback (?)
So! What should I want to do now, with it? And what
will I not want to do? Is there a good guide?
I don't particularly want to read "pirated" books.
But I don't want to be limited as to what e-books
I can buy and/or use.
Maybe I should try it out on tongue twisters like
"The Leith police dismisseth us" or "Cimmerian barbarian".

I have an old Kindle which will handle .txt files, and which appears as
a USB drive when plugged in to a computer. Stuff that I download from
Project Gutenberg or buy from Baen I turn into .txt and copy to the
documents folder of the Kindle. Sometimes that garbles a few non-ascii
characters, but I usually don't care about that (It did become slightly
irritating with "Mission to Methone" where the e is non-ascii due to an
accent). I don't know how much of this works with a Generation 8 Kindle,
but I'd be interested to know, because sooner or later my old Kindle
will die.
(I do buy stuff from Amazon - I just don't want to be limited to that)

In Heaven's name, why are you doing that?!? Use the .mobi downloads from
Gutenberg and Baen!

[Ninapenda Jibini]

In article

On Friday, July 27, 2018 at 12:17:02 AM UTC+1, Robert Carnegie

Post by Robert Carnegie
I got a birthday present of a Kindle! Model SY69JL
("Generation 8" apparently); I read that it has wi-fi
and has a screen read-out-er that operates over Bluetooth,
although it doesn't do audio playback (?)
So! What should I want to do now, with it? And what
will I not want to do? Is there a good guide?
I don't particularly want to read "pirated" books.
But I don't want to be limited as to what e-books
I can buy and/or use.
Maybe I should try it out on tongue twisters like
"The Leith police dismisseth us" or "Cimmerian barbarian".

I have an old Kindle which will handle .txt files, and which
appears as a USB drive when plugged in to a computer. Stuff that
I download from Project Gutenberg or buy from Baen I turn into
.txt and copy to the documents folder of the Kindle. Sometimes
that garbles a few non-ascii characters, but I usually don't
care about that (It did become slightly irritating with "Mission
to Methone" where the e is non-ascii due to an accent). I don't
know how much of this works with a Generation 8 Kindle, but I'd
be interested to know, because sooner or later my old Kindle
will die.
(I do buy stuff from Amazon - I just don't want to be limited to that)

In Heaven's name, why are you doing that?!? Use the .mobi
downloads from Gutenberg and Baen!

Aside from being very easy to maintain a library with, in my
experience, Calibre does a *far* better job of formatting for a
particular file type than, well, pretty much anybody else other
than the device manufacturer. And in the case of Barnes and Noble,
and the nook, it does a better job than the manufacurer, too. Back
when I still bought books from B&N (before they decided to fuck
their customers in the ass at every possible opportunity), I would
often run ebooks through Calibre, and convert from .epub to .epub,
then sideload even though it was already downloaded (when I still
used actual nook hardware). Cleaned up a lot of crap formatting.

I have never noted Project Gutenberg to be consistently competent
at constructing .epubs.

[Ted Nolan <tednolan>]

Post by Ninapenda Jibini

In article

Post by m***@sky.com

Post by Robert Carnegie
I got a birthday present of a Kindle! Model SY69JL
("Generation 8" apparently); I read that it has wi-fi
and has a screen read-out-er that operates over Bluetooth,
although it doesn't do audio playback (?)
So! What should I want to do now, with it? And what
will I not want to do? Is there a good guide?
I don't particularly want to read "pirated" books.
But I don't want to be limited as to what e-books
I can buy and/or use.
Maybe I should try it out on tongue twisters like
"The Leith police dismisseth us" or "Cimmerian barbarian".

I have an old Kindle which will handle .txt files, and which
appears as a USB drive when plugged in to a computer. Stuff that
I download from Project Gutenberg or buy from Baen I turn into
.txt and copy to the documents folder of the Kindle. Sometimes
that garbles a few non-ascii characters, but I usually don't
care about that (It did become slightly irritating with "Mission
to Methone" where the e is non-ascii due to an accent). I don't
know how much of this works with a Generation 8 Kindle, but I'd
be interested to know, because sooner or later my old Kindle
will die.
(I do buy stuff from Amazon - I just don't want to be limited to that)

In Heaven's name, why are you doing that?!? Use the .mobi
downloads from Gutenberg and Baen!

Aside from being very easy to maintain a library with, in my
experience, Calibre does a *far* better job of formatting for a
particular file type than, well, pretty much anybody else other
than the device manufacturer. And in the case of Barnes and Noble,
and the nook, it does a better job than the manufacurer, too. Back
when I still bought books from B&N (before they decided to fuck
their customers in the ass at every possible opportunity), I would
often run ebooks through Calibre, and convert from .epub to .epub,
then sideload even though it was already downloaded (when I still
used actual nook hardware). Cleaned up a lot of crap formatting.
I have never noted Project Gutenberg to be consistently competent
at constructing .epubs.

OK, fair enough, but my main point is that using .txt as a starting point
is... bad.

[Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha]

Post by Ted Nolan <tednolan>

Post by Ninapenda Jibini

In article

Post by m***@sky.com

Post by Robert Carnegie
I got a birthday present of a Kindle! Model SY69JL
("Generation 8" apparently); I read that it has wi-fi
and has a screen read-out-er that operates over Bluetooth,
although it doesn't do audio playback (?)
So! What should I want to do now, with it? And what
will I not want to do? Is there a good guide?
I don't particularly want to read "pirated" books.
But I don't want to be limited as to what e-books
I can buy and/or use.
Maybe I should try it out on tongue twisters like
"The Leith police dismisseth us" or "Cimmerian barbarian".

I have an old Kindle which will handle .txt files, and which
appears as a USB drive when plugged in to a computer. Stuff
that I download from Project Gutenberg or buy from Baen I turn
into .txt and copy to the documents folder of the Kindle.
Sometimes that garbles a few non-ascii characters, but I
usually don't care about that (It did become slightly
irritating with "Mission to Methone" where the e is non-ascii
due to an accent). I don't know how much of this works with a
Generation 8 Kindle, but I'd be interested to know, because
sooner or later my old Kindle will die.
(I do buy stuff from Amazon - I just don't want to be limited to that)

In Heaven's name, why are you doing that?!? Use the .mobi
downloads from Gutenberg and Baen!

Aside from being very easy to maintain a library with, in my
experience, Calibre does a *far* better job of formatting for a
particular file type than, well, pretty much anybody else other
than the device manufacturer. And in the case of Barnes and
Noble, and the nook, it does a better job than the manufacurer,
too. Back when I still bought books from B&N (before they
decided to fuck their customers in the ass at every possible
opportunity), I would often run ebooks through Calibre, and
convert from .epub to .epub, then sideload even though it was
already downloaded (when I still used actual nook hardware).
Cleaned up a lot of crap formatting.
I have never noted Project Gutenberg to be consistently
competent at constructing .epubs.

OK, fair enough, but my main point is that using .txt as a
starting point is... bad.

It's a lot of work, since the .txt is not a book, it's a
manuscript. And, compared to actual manuscripts, it's not even
compelte (since actual manuscripts, even the days of typewriters,
had provision for noting things like italics and bold, that are
generally missing from .txt files).
--
Terry Austin

Vacation photos from Iceland:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/QaXQkB

"Terry Austin: like the polio vaccine, only with more asshole."
-- David Bilek

Jesus forgives sinners, not criminals.

[Bill Gill]

Post by Ninapenda Jibini
I have never noted Project Gutenberg to be consistently competent
at constructing .epubs.

I particularly noticed that when I downloaded the complete
works of Shakespeare. I checked the table of contents and
it was unusable. I went ahead and reworked the file enough
to get that working, but there are still a bunch of problems.
Stage directions, which should be right justified are set off
by spaces. Of course epub, which is basically HtML, doesn't
recognize multiple spaces. So you really have to watch to
make sure you realize where you are.

I also noticed in at least one place there was one of the
standard errors of scanned documents. A lot of times 'h' and
'b' are mixed up. So I figured out what they really meant when
the stage direction said "exeunt hearing Antony's body". I'm
not sure how you hear a body. I think it maybe should have
been "bearing".

This is a problem with a lot of scanned books. I even have one
book of short stories in a current series that were
scanned. There are a lot of errors in it that are really
obvious. I do a lot better and I am just working for myself. If
I was scanning commercially I would certainly try to do better.

Bill

[Kevrob]

Post by Bill Gill
I also noticed in at least one place there was one of the
standard errors of scanned documents. A lot of times 'h' and
'b' are mixed up. ...
This is a problem with a lot of scanned books.

Hence the slang "scanno."

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scanno

Kevin R

[Scott Lurndal]

Post by Bill Gill
Stage directions, which should be right justified are set off
by spaces. Of course epub, which is basically HtML, doesn't
recognize multiple spaces.

Sure it does. Use the correct entity, e.g. &nbsp;

[Bill Gill]

Post by Scott Lurndal

Post by Bill Gill
Stage directions, which should be right justified are set off
by spaces. Of course epub, which is basically HtML, doesn't
recognize multiple spaces.

Sure it does. Use the correct entity, e.g. &nbsp;

The people who did the scan didn't. They should have
used right justification. Even non-breaking spaces don't
necessarily match the requirements on different readers.

Bill

[Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha]

Post by Bill Gill

Post by Scott Lurndal

Post by Bill Gill
Stage directions, which should be right justified are set off
by spaces. Of course epub, which is basically HtML, doesn't
recognize multiple spaces.

Sure it does. Use the correct entity, e.g. &nbsp;

The people who did the scan didn't. They should have
used right justification. Even non-breaking spaces don't
necessarily match the requirements on different readers.

I'd prefer they actually proofread _at all_, but that's expecting too
much for most of the old books that are only now being made available
as ebooks.
--
Terry Austin

Vacation photos from Iceland:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/QaXQkB

"Terry Austin: like the polio vaccine, only with more asshole."
-- David Bilek

Jesus forgives sinners, not criminals.

[Greg Goss]

Post by Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha

Post by Bill Gill

Post by Scott Lurndal

Post by Bill Gill
Stage directions, which should be right justified are set off
by spaces. Of course epub, which is basically HtML, doesn't
recognize multiple spaces.

Sure it does. Use the correct entity, e.g. &nbsp;

The people who did the scan didn't. They should have
used right justification. Even non-breaking spaces don't
necessarily match the requirements on different readers.

I'd prefer they actually proofread _at all_, but that's expecting too
much for most of the old books that are only now being made available
as ebooks.

They have a multi-level proofreading process that's supposed to make a
clean book from a pretty good scan.

https://www.pgdp.net/c/

I dunno if the uglies you're reporting were done before they set up
pgdp?

[Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha]

Post by Greg Goss

Post by Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha

Post by Bill Gill

Post by Scott Lurndal

Post by Bill Gill
Stage directions, which should be right justified are set
off by spaces. Of course epub, which is basically HtML,
doesn't recognize multiple spaces.

Sure it does. Use the correct entity, e.g. &nbsp;

The people who did the scan didn't. They should have
used right justification. Even non-breaking spaces don't
necessarily match the requirements on different readers.

I'd prefer they actually proofread _at all_, but that's
expecting too much for most of the old books that are only now
being made available as ebooks.

They have a multi-level proofreading process that's supposed to
make a clean book from a pretty good scan.

I'm sure they do. It'd be great if they started using it.

Post by Greg Goss
https://www.pgdp.net/c/
I dunno if the uglies you're reporting were done before they set
up pgdp?

I suspect the real issue is that the stuff I get from Gutenberg is
generally real niche stuff that doesn't get looked at because
nobody is interested in it. Stuff popular enough to get a proper
amount of attention by volunteers is generally popular enough that
it's availabe through Amazon at marginal cost, which is far more
convenient for me.
--
Terry Austin

Vacation photos from Iceland:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/QaXQkB

"Terry Austin: like the polio vaccine, only with more asshole."
-- David Bilek

Jesus forgives sinners, not criminals.

[Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha]

Post by Bill Gill

Post by Ninapenda Jibini
I have never noted Project Gutenberg to be consistently
competent at constructing .epubs.

I particularly noticed that when I downloaded the complete
works of Shakespeare. I checked the table of contents and
it was unusable. I went ahead and reworked the file enough
to get that working, but there are still a bunch of problems.
Stage directions, which should be right justified are set off
by spaces. Of course epub, which is basically HtML, doesn't
recognize multiple spaces.

Well, not actual spaces. You have to do it on purpose with
non-breakign spaces.

Post by Bill Gill
So you really have to watch to
make sure you realize where you are.
I also noticed in at least one place there was one of the
standard errors of scanned documents. A lot of times 'h' and
'b' are mixed up. So I figured out what they really meant when
the stage direction said "exeunt hearing Antony's body". I'm
not sure how you hear a body. I think it maybe should have
been "bearing".
This is a problem with a lot of scanned books. I even have one
book of short stories in a current series that were
scanned. There are a lot of errors in it that are really
obvious. I do a lot better and I am just working for myself.
If I was scanning commercially I would certainly try to do
better.

Sadly, while many, many books from the days before ebooks have
been made available, it's far more common than not to rely solely
on OCR, with zero proofreading. I see a *lot* of stuff that I
would be embarassed to put my name to. It is exeedingly
frustrating to pay close to paperback prices and get something
that is that difficult to read. A few, I have had to load into
Calibre's edit screen and do a global search and replace to fix
formatting errors that created paragraph breaks in the middle of
words. That, at least, was trivial to fix (making it even more
inexcusable in a commercial product).
--
Terry Austin

Vacation photos from Iceland:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/QaXQkB

"Terry Austin: like the polio vaccine, only with more asshole."
-- David Bilek

Jesus forgives sinners, not criminals.

[Panthera Tigris Altaica]

Post by Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha

Post by Bill Gill

Post by Ninapenda Jibini
I have never noted Project Gutenberg to be consistently
competent at constructing .epubs.

I particularly noticed that when I downloaded the complete
works of Shakespeare. I checked the table of contents and
it was unusable. I went ahead and reworked the file enough
to get that working, but there are still a bunch of problems.
Stage directions, which should be right justified are set off
by spaces. Of course epub, which is basically HtML, doesn't
recognize multiple spaces.

Well, not actual spaces. You have to do it on purpose with
non-breakign spaces.

Post by Bill Gill
So you really have to watch to
make sure you realize where you are.
I also noticed in at least one place there was one of the
standard errors of scanned documents. A lot of times 'h' and
'b' are mixed up. So I figured out what they really meant when
the stage direction said "exeunt hearing Antony's body". I'm
not sure how you hear a body. I think it maybe should have
been "bearing".
This is a problem with a lot of scanned books. I even have one
book of short stories in a current series that were
scanned. There are a lot of errors in it that are really
obvious. I do a lot better and I am just working for myself.
If I was scanning commercially I would certainly try to do
better.

Sadly, while many, many books from the days before ebooks have
been made available, it's far more common than not to rely solely
on OCR, with zero proofreading. I see a *lot* of stuff that I
would be embarassed to put my name to.

I am currently reading a retail EPUB, from Baen Books, of a relatively recent book (1998 copyright) which almost certainly arrived at Baen in digital form. It has inconsistent rendering of single and double quotes, of accents, and especially of circumflexes. There are two characters in the book which have circumflexes in their names, circumflex-a and circumflex-u, respectively, and those names sometimes have the correct rendering and then on the very same page have a question mark instead of the correct rendering. It drops me completely out of the flow of reading the book. This is, I repeat, a retail copy, not something some volunteer cranked out in his spare time. Someone was paid to produce this. As it is a Baen book, it does not have DRM and I can use calibre to correct most/all of the errors. I was recently reading another retail book, in Amazon Kindle format with DRM, which had numerous egregious errors, including misspelling 'tire' as 'the', misspelling 'the' as 'tire', and many other similar OCR errors which were never corrected. Because it has DRM I cannot easily correct it, and it grates that Amazon and the publisher thought enough of it to infest it with DRM and to charge fairly serious money for it, but didn't think enough of it, and the readers, to properly proof read it.

Unfortunately it is not just ebooks which are improperly proofed. I have seen obvious errors in many hardback and paperback books, obvious errors which should have been picked up by any half-way competent editor very early in the publishing process. This leads me to suspect that either many books, including many books by popular authors, are either not edited at all or are edited by half-trained chimps. The hardcover first edition of Weber's Safehold books has an entire page wherein every instance of the word 'Charis' is instead rendered 'Corisande', and vice versa, which makes that page very confusing. I suspect that the half-trained chimps let some apprentice baboons have some practice. It was corrected for the most part, there are still two errors, in the ebook version.

Post by Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha
It is exeedingly
frustrating to pay close to paperback prices and get something
that is that difficult to read. A few, I have had to load into
Calibre's edit screen and do a global search and replace to fix
formatting errors that created paragraph breaks in the middle of
words. That, at least, was trivial to fix (making it even more
inexcusable in a commercial product).

The publishers simply do not care. They shovel out anything they can, and expect to be paid for their lack of effort.

[Robert Carnegie]

According to the Kindle manual I've been reading,
there's feature to report errors in books. I'll
go back and make sure I know how to use it.

Also, HTML that I know includes the "PRE" tag,
which makes text display with ASCII spaces and
line breaks; probably UTF-whatever, too.
But it may not work in all contexts.

[Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha]

Post by Robert Carnegie
According to the Kindle manual I've been reading,
there's feature to report errors in books. I'll
go back and make sure I know how to use it.
Also, HTML that I know includes the "PRE" tag,
which makes text display with ASCII spaces and
line breaks; probably UTF-whatever, too.
But it may not work in all contexts.

It isn't used much, and generally looks like shit because it loses a
lot of formatting and often defaults to a fixed width font.
--
Terry Austin

Vacation photos from Iceland:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/QaXQkB

"Terry Austin: like the polio vaccine, only with more asshole."
-- David Bilek

Jesus forgives sinners, not criminals.

[Jerry Brown]

On Mon, 30 Jul 2018 12:56:04 -0700 (PDT), Robert Carnegie

Post by Robert Carnegie
According to the Kindle manual I've been reading,
there's feature to report errors in books. I'll
go back and make sure I know how to use it.

Be preapred for a long wait; I reported a missing block of text from
LMB's Paladin of Souls over a year ago, and it's still not been fixed.

[Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha]

Post by Jerry Brown
On Mon, 30 Jul 2018 12:56:04 -0700 (PDT), Robert Carnegie

Post by Robert Carnegie
According to the Kindle manual I've been reading,
there's feature to report errors in books. I'll
go back and make sure I know how to use it.

Be preapred for a long wait; I reported a missing block of text
from LMB's Paladin of Souls over a year ago, and it's still not
been fixed.

Have you reported it to Bujold? She can (and has) fix such things,
though you may have to manually force the update.

(For that matter, have you tried a forced manual update to the title?
I gather they often don't happen automatically.)
--
Terry Austin

Vacation photos from Iceland:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/QaXQkB

"Terry Austin: like the polio vaccine, only with more asshole."
-- David Bilek

Jesus forgives sinners, not criminals.

[Jerry Brown]

On Mon, 30 Jul 2018 13:53:50 -0700, Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha

Post by Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha

Post by Jerry Brown
On Mon, 30 Jul 2018 12:56:04 -0700 (PDT), Robert Carnegie

Post by Robert Carnegie
According to the Kindle manual I've been reading,
there's feature to report errors in books. I'll
go back and make sure I know how to use it.

Be preapred for a long wait; I reported a missing block of text
from LMB's Paladin of Souls over a year ago, and it's still not
been fixed.

Have you reported it to Bujold? She can (and has) fix such things,
though you may have to manually force the update.
(For that matter, have you tried a forced manual update to the title?
I gather they often don't happen automatically.)

Chapter 25 of the Kindle edition ends with "Ista opened her jaws in a
fierce grin, and took it in a gulp". The missing line following this
is (IMHO) one of LMB's Crowning Moments of Awesome dialogue, so I
remembered it clearly from the hardcopy I'd read a decade previously.

I don't know if LMB's email from the last time she posted to this
groups is still active, so am not sure how to contact her. Instead I
tried to use the Kindle's build in correction option, as follows:

I highlighted the last line, selected "More" from the context menu,
then "Report Content Error". I chose "Other" (the other options were
"Type", "Formatting", and "Image", then filled in the freeform text
box with something along the lines of "rest of chapter missing". I
didn't have access to a physical copy at the time, so couldn't supply
the missing text, but I would expect that Amazon would have access to
the complete correct text.

I've found my PB copy now, so I suppose I could try again, this time
including Ista's response to Joen, but my suspicion is that a fix
won't be applied until a threshold number of reports is reached.

I have previously received automatic corrections to books, one to an
Iain M Banks Culture novel (which had the unfortunate side effect of
wiping out all my highlights and bookmarks). I don't know if there is
a way to force a check for an updated version.

[Greg Goss]

Post by Jerry Brown
On Mon, 30 Jul 2018 13:53:50 -0700, Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha

Post by Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha

Post by Jerry Brown
On Mon, 30 Jul 2018 12:56:04 -0700 (PDT), Robert Carnegie

Post by Robert Carnegie
According to the Kindle manual I've been reading,
there's feature to report errors in books. I'll
go back and make sure I know how to use it.

Be preapred for a long wait; I reported a missing block of text
from LMB's Paladin of Souls over a year ago, and it's still not
been fixed.

Have you reported it to Bujold? She can (and has) fix such things,
though you may have to manually force the update.
(For that matter, have you tried a forced manual update to the title?
I gather they often don't happen automatically.)

Chapter 25 of the Kindle edition ends with "Ista opened her jaws in a
fierce grin, and took it in a gulp". The missing line following this
is (IMHO) one of LMB's Crowning Moments of Awesome dialogue, so I
remembered it clearly from the hardcopy I'd read a decade previously.
I don't know if LMB's email from the last time she posted to this
groups is still active, so am not sure how to contact her. Instead I

She is active on her pseudo-usenet group on Baen. I receive that
group into my newsgroup reader.

[Greg Goss]

Post by Greg Goss

Post by Jerry Brown
On Mon, 30 Jul 2018 13:53:50 -0700, Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha

Post by Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha
Have you reported it to Bujold? She can (and has) fix such things,
though you may have to manually force the update.
(For that matter, have you tried a forced manual update to the title?
I gather they often don't happen automatically.)

Chapter 25 of the Kindle edition ends with "Ista opened her jaws in a
fierce grin, and took it in a gulp". The missing line following this
is (IMHO) one of LMB's Crowning Moments of Awesome dialogue, so I
remembered it clearly from the hardcopy I'd read a decade previously.
I don't know if LMB's email from the last time she posted to this
groups is still active, so am not sure how to contact her. Instead I

She is active on her pseudo-usenet group on Baen. I receive that
group into my newsgroup reader.

The email she uses there is LMB <***@myinfmail.com>

[Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha]

Post by Jerry Brown
On Mon, 30 Jul 2018 13:53:50 -0700, Jibini Kula Tumbili

Post by Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha

Post by Jerry Brown
On Mon, 30 Jul 2018 12:56:04 -0700 (PDT), Robert Carnegie

Post by Robert Carnegie
According to the Kindle manual I've been reading,
there's feature to report errors in books. I'll
go back and make sure I know how to use it.

Be preapred for a long wait; I reported a missing block of
text from LMB's Paladin of Souls over a year ago, and it's
still not been fixed.

Have you reported it to Bujold? She can (and has) fix such
things, though you may have to manually force the update.
(For that matter, have you tried a forced manual update to the
title? I gather they often don't happen automatically.)

Chapter 25 of the Kindle edition ends with "Ista opened her jaws
in a fierce grin, and took it in a gulp". The missing line
following this is (IMHO) one of LMB's Crowning Moments of
Awesome dialogue, so I remembered it clearly from the hardcopy
I'd read a decade previously.

There was a discussion of the same issue with "The Prisoner of
Limnos" last year:

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/15922151-
aaaaarrrrggghhh-limnos-missing-paragraphs

https://tinyurl.com/y8xx9g4e

If you dig through the comments, there is a discussion of how to
force a manual update (if one is available).

Post by Jerry Brown
I don't know if LMB's email from the last time she posted to
this groups is still active, so am not sure how to contact her.

Her blog is at:

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16094.Lois_McMaster_Bujold/bl
og

https://tinyurl.com/y8mktnpk

There's a link in the upper right to "Lois McMaster Bujold's
profile" (next to the photo of her), which has a funtion to "Ask
LMB a question." I don't know if that's an appropirate way to
contact her (though it says it will remain private until answered),
but I do know she pays attention to everything on the blog (even if
she doesn't post very often).

It's hard to believe she hasn't been made aware of this before now,
but it's possible.

Post by Jerry Brown
Instead I tried to use the Kindle's build in correction option,
I highlighted the last line, selected "More" from the context
menu, then "Report Content Error". I chose "Other" (the other
options were "Type", "Formatting", and "Image", then filled in
the freeform text box with something along the lines of "rest of
chapter missing". I didn't have access to a physical copy at the
time, so couldn't supply the missing text, but I would expect
that Amazon would have access to the complete correct text.
I've found my PB copy now, so I suppose I could try again, this
time including Ista's response to Joen, but my suspicion is that
a fix won't be applied until a threshold number of reports is
reached.
I have previously received automatic corrections to books, one
to an Iain M Banks Culture novel (which had the unfortunate side
effect of wiping out all my highlights and bookmarks). I don't
know if there is a way to force a check for an updated version.

Check the link above. It will at least get you to the right page on
your Amazon account.
--
Terry Austin

Vacation photos from Iceland:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/QaXQkB

"Terry Austin: like the polio vaccine, only with more asshole."
-- David Bilek

Jesus forgives sinners, not criminals.

[Jerry Brown]

On Mon, 30 Jul 2018 16:08:27 -0700, Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha

Post by Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha

Post by Jerry Brown
On Mon, 30 Jul 2018 13:53:50 -0700, Jibini Kula Tumbili

Post by Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha

Post by Jerry Brown
On Mon, 30 Jul 2018 12:56:04 -0700 (PDT), Robert Carnegie

Post by Robert Carnegie
According to the Kindle manual I've been reading,
there's feature to report errors in books. I'll
go back and make sure I know how to use it.

Be preapred for a long wait; I reported a missing block of
text from LMB's Paladin of Souls over a year ago, and it's
still not been fixed.

Have you reported it to Bujold? She can (and has) fix such
things, though you may have to manually force the update.
(For that matter, have you tried a forced manual update to the
title? I gather they often don't happen automatically.)

Chapter 25 of the Kindle edition ends with "Ista opened her jaws
in a fierce grin, and took it in a gulp". The missing line
following this is (IMHO) one of LMB's Crowning Moments of
Awesome dialogue, so I remembered it clearly from the hardcopy
I'd read a decade previously.

There was a discussion of the same issue with "The Prisoner of
https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/15922151-
aaaaarrrrggghhh-limnos-missing-paragraphs
https://tinyurl.com/y8xx9g4e
If you dig through the comments, there is a discussion of how to
force a manual update (if one is available).

Post by Jerry Brown
I don't know if LMB's email from the last time she posted to
this groups is still active, so am not sure how to contact her.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16094.Lois_McMaster_Bujold/bl
og
https://tinyurl.com/y8mktnpk
There's a link in the upper right to "Lois McMaster Bujold's
profile" (next to the photo of her), which has a funtion to "Ask
LMB a question." I don't know if that's an appropirate way to
contact her (though it says it will remain private until answered),
but I do know she pays attention to everything on the blog (even if
she doesn't post very often).
It's hard to believe she hasn't been made aware of this before now,
but it's possible.

Post by Jerry Brown
Instead I tried to use the Kindle's build in correction option,
I highlighted the last line, selected "More" from the context
menu, then "Report Content Error". I chose "Other" (the other
options were "Type", "Formatting", and "Image", then filled in
the freeform text box with something along the lines of "rest of
chapter missing". I didn't have access to a physical copy at the
time, so couldn't supply the missing text, but I would expect
that Amazon would have access to the complete correct text.
I've found my PB copy now, so I suppose I could try again, this
time including Ista's response to Joen, but my suspicion is that
a fix won't be applied until a threshold number of reports is
reached.
I have previously received automatic corrections to books, one
to an Iain M Banks Culture novel (which had the unfortunate side
effect of wiping out all my highlights and bookmarks). I don't
know if there is a way to force a check for an updated version.

Check the link above. It will at least get you to the right page on
your Amazon account.

Thanks Terry, will do.

[Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha]

On Monday, July 30, 2018 at 12:10:18 PM UTC-4, Jibini Kula

Post by Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha

Post by Bill Gill

Post by Ninapenda Jibini
I have never noted Project Gutenberg to be consistently
competent at constructing .epubs.

I particularly noticed that when I downloaded the complete
works of Shakespeare. I checked the table of contents and
it was unusable. I went ahead and reworked the file enough
to get that working, but there are still a bunch of problems.
Stage directions, which should be right justified are set off
by spaces. Of course epub, which is basically HtML, doesn't
recognize multiple spaces.

Well, not actual spaces. You have to do it on purpose with
non-breakign spaces.

Post by Bill Gill
So you really have to watch to
make sure you realize where you are.
I also noticed in at least one place there was one of the
standard errors of scanned documents. A lot of times 'h' and
'b' are mixed up. So I figured out what they really meant
when the stage direction said "exeunt hearing Antony's body".
I'm not sure how you hear a body. I think it maybe should
have been "bearing".
This is a problem with a lot of scanned books. I even have
one book of short stories in a current series that were
scanned. There are a lot of errors in it that are really
obvious. I do a lot better and I am just working for myself.
If I was scanning commercially I would certainly try to do
better.

Sadly, while many, many books from the days before ebooks have
been made available, it's far more common than not to rely
solely on OCR, with zero proofreading. I see a *lot* of stuff
that I would be embarassed to put my name to.

I am currently reading a retail EPUB, from Baen Books, of a
relatively recent book (1998 copyright) which almost certainly
arrived at Baen in digital form. It has inconsistent rendering
of single and double quotes, of accents, and especially of
circumflexes. There are two characters in the book which have
circumflexes in their names, circumflex-a and circumflex-u,
respectively, and those names sometimes have the correct
rendering and then on the very same page have a question mark
instead of the correct rendering. It drops me completely out of
the flow of reading the book. This is, I repeat, a retail copy,
not something some volunteer cranked out in his spare time.
Someone was paid to produce this.

1998 was before ebooks became a real thing (the Kindle was
introduced in 2007). And while the manuscript may well have arrived
as some sort of digital file, it's entirely possible they didn't
keep a copy of it (or it was lost). 1998 was early in the absolute,
total ubiquitousness of ocmputers and non-volative storage being
nearly free.

As it is a Baen book, it does
not have DRM and I can use calibre to correct most/all of the
errors. I was recently reading another retail book, in Amazon
Kindle format with DRM, which had numerous egregious errors,
including misspelling 'tire' as 'the', misspelling 'the' as
'tire', and many other similar OCR errors which were never
corrected. Because it has DRM I cannot easily correct it, and it
grates that Amazon and the publisher thought enough of it to
infest it with DRM and to charge fairly serious money for it,
but didn't think enough of it, and the readers, to properly
proof read it.

It is trivial to remove DRM from Kindle books, you know.

Unfortunately it is not just ebooks which are improperly
proofed. I have seen obvious errors in many hardback and
paperback books, obvious errors which should have been picked up
by any half-way competent editor very early in the publishing
process. This leads me to suspect that either many books,
including many books by popular authors, are either not edited
at all or are edited by half-trained chimps. The hardcover first
edition of Weber's Safehold books has an entire page wherein
every instance of the word 'Charis' is instead rendered
'Corisande', and vice versa, which makes that page very
confusing. I suspect that the half-trained chimps let some
apprentice baboons have some practice. It was corrected for the
most part, there are still two errors, in the ebook version.

Editors aren't proofreaders, and editors don't really get to do
much editing any more, and proofreaders are an endangered species.

And therein lies the real problem.

Post by Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha
It is exeedingly
frustrating to pay close to paperback prices and get something
that is that difficult to read. A few, I have had to load into
Calibre's edit screen and do a global search and replace to fix
formatting errors that created paragraph breaks in the middle
of words. That, at least, was trivial to fix (making it even
more inexcusable in a commercial product).

The publishers simply do not care. They shovel out anything they
can, and expect to be paid for their lack of effort.

It's a rough business to be in, and everybody has been cost cutting
way past what is feasible for decades. Which creates a self-
reinforcing death spiral: cut quality by cutting costs, because
sales are down, and thus reduce sales, requiring more cost cutting.

Ebooks, and the fact that homeless bums can now self-publish
through Amazon and reach the biggest market in the world, is not
helping on that score.
--
Terry Austin

Vacation photos from Iceland:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/QaXQkB

"Terry Austin: like the polio vaccine, only with more asshole."
-- David Bilek

Jesus forgives sinners, not criminals.

[Greg Goss]

Post by Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha
1998 was before ebooks became a real thing (the Kindle was
introduced in 2007). And while the manuscript may well have arrived
as some sort of digital file, it's entirely possible they didn't
keep a copy of it (or it was lost). 1998 was early in the absolute,
total ubiquitousness of ocmputers and non-volative storage being
nearly free.

In the afterword to 2010 (1983) Clarke comments on the joy of sending
an entire novel back and forth (to a collaborator? editor?) on a
single 8 inch disk.

[Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha]

Post by Greg Goss

Post by Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha
1998 was before ebooks became a real thing (the Kindle was
introduced in 2007). And while the manuscript may well have
arrived as some sort of digital file, it's entirely possible
they didn't keep a copy of it (or it was lost). 1998 was early
in the absolute, total ubiquitousness of ocmputers and
non-volative storage being nearly free.

In the afterword to 2010 (1983) Clarke comments on the joy of
sending an entire novel back and forth (to a collaborator?
editor?) on a single 8 inch disk.

And stuff from that era generally wasn't kept once it was unlikely to
be reprinted (by the publisher - the author may well have kept their
own copy).
--
Terry Austin

Vacation photos from Iceland:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/QaXQkB

"Terry Austin: like the polio vaccine, only with more asshole."
-- David Bilek

Jesus forgives sinners, not criminals.

[m***@sky.com]

Post by Ted Nolan <tednolan>

Post by m***@sky.com

Post by Robert Carnegie
I got a birthday present of a Kindle! Model SY69JL
("Generation 8" apparently); I read that it has wi-fi
and has a screen read-out-er that operates over Bluetooth,
although it doesn't do audio playback (?)
So! What should I want to do now, with it? And what
will I not want to do? Is there a good guide?
I don't particularly want to read "pirated" books.
But I don't want to be limited as to what e-books
I can buy and/or use.
Maybe I should try it out on tongue twisters like
"The Leith police dismisseth us" or "Cimmerian barbarian".

I have an old Kindle which will handle .txt files, and which appears as
a USB drive when plugged in to a computer. Stuff that I download from
Project Gutenberg or buy from Baen I turn into .txt and copy to the
documents folder of the Kindle. Sometimes that garbles a few non-ascii
characters, but I usually don't care about that (It did become slightly
irritating with "Mission to Methone" where the e is non-ascii due to an
accent). I don't know how much of this works with a Generation 8 Kindle,
but I'd be interested to know, because sooner or later my old Kindle
will die.
(I do buy stuff from Amazon - I just don't want to be limited to that)

In Heaven's name, why are you doing that?!? Use the .mobi downloads from
Gutenberg and Baen!
--
------
columbiaclosings.com
What's not in Columbia anymore..

I feel that if I store .txt, or something I can generate txt from with commonly available software (such as .rtf) then I can expect everything to work reasonably well, and I'm not at the mercy of specialised software that might not be supported in future, or on a different platform. Also, I don't notice much of a difference in readability between stuff I buy or download via .txt and stuff I buy from amazon as .azw.

[Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha]

On Friday, July 27, 2018 at 5:13:54 AM UTC+1, Ted Nolan

In article

Post by m***@sky.com

Post by Robert Carnegie
I got a birthday present of a Kindle! Model SY69JL
("Generation 8" apparently); I read that it has wi-fi
and has a screen read-out-er that operates over Bluetooth,
although it doesn't do audio playback (?)
So! What should I want to do now, with it? And what
will I not want to do? Is there a good guide?
I don't particularly want to read "pirated" books.
But I don't want to be limited as to what e-books
I can buy and/or use.
Maybe I should try it out on tongue twisters like
"The Leith police dismisseth us" or "Cimmerian barbarian".

I have an old Kindle which will handle .txt files, and which
appears as a USB drive when plugged in to a computer. Stuff
that I download from Project Gutenberg or buy from Baen I turn
into .txt and copy to the documents folder of the Kindle.
Sometimes that garbles a few non-ascii characters, but I
usually don't care about that (It did become slightly
irritating with "Mission to Methone" where the e is non-ascii
due to an accent). I don't know how much of this works with a
Generation 8 Kindle, but I'd be interested to know, because
sooner or later my old Kindle will die.
(I do buy stuff from Amazon - I just don't want to be limited to that)

In Heaven's name, why are you doing that?!? Use the .mobi
downloads from Gutenberg and Baen!
--
------
columbiaclosings.com
What's not in Columbia anymore..

I feel that if I store .txt, or something I can generate txt
from with commonly available software (such as .rtf) then I can
expect everything to work reasonably well, and I'm not at the
mercy of specialised software that might not be supported in
future, or on a different platform. Also, I don't notice much of
a difference in readability between stuff I buy or download via
.txt and stuff I buy from amazon as .azw.

I feel like I should point out that .epubs are HTML in a .zip file,
and HTML is text with tags that are easily stripped out if need be
(and .zips can be opened directly as a file folder in most OS's).
--
Terry Austin

Vacation photos from Iceland:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/QaXQkB

"Terry Austin: like the polio vaccine, only with more asshole."
-- David Bilek

Jesus forgives sinners, not criminals.

[Joe Bernstein]

Post by Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha

On Friday, July 27, 2018 at 5:13:54 AM UTC+1, Ted Nolan

In article

Post by m***@sky.com
I have an old Kindle which will handle .txt files, and which
appears as a USB drive when plugged in to a computer. Stuff
that I download from Project Gutenberg or buy from Baen I turn
into .txt and copy to the documents folder of the Kindle.
Sometimes that garbles a few non-ascii characters, but I
usually don't care about that (It did become slightly
irritating with "Mission to Methone" where the e is non-ascii
due to an accent).

In Heaven's name, why are you doing that?!? Use the .mobi
downloads from Gutenberg and Baen!

I feel that if I store .txt, or something I can generate txt
from with commonly available software (such as .rtf) then I can
expect everything to work reasonably well, and I'm not at the
mercy of specialised software that might not be supported in
future, or on a different platform. Also, I don't notice much of
a difference in readability between stuff I buy or download via
.txt and stuff I buy from amazon as .azw.

I feel like I should point out that .epubs are HTML in a .zip file,
and HTML is text with tags that are easily stripped out if need be
(and .zips can be opened directly as a file folder in most OS's).

I run into problems with zipped files intermittently in my current
situation (i.e., without a computer I control other than my phone).

And this may not be relevant to .epubs, but is relevant to some
things I've encountered lately: there are pseudo-zips too. These,
I routinely have trouble with. (gzip, most obviously. The most
important single reason to run Linux if you can is not something
useful Linux does, it's dealing with the Linux uber alles assholes
who use gzip.)

Which is sorta the point. Text editing is wondrously portable; many
other things, less so. Competent text editing needn't degrade HTML
nor for that matter accents, unless your system is from the 1980s.

I gather the standard for e-mail is now IMAP. Sooner or later, I'll
have to use that to download all my Gmail e-mail - and then find a
way to convert it to mbox so I can actually read it, and process it
into permanent storage, using a text editor, more efficiently than
with ever-changing e-mail programs.

Joe Bernstein

[Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha]

Post by Joe Bernstein

Post by Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha

On Friday, July 27, 2018 at 5:13:54 AM UTC+1, Ted Nolan

In article

Post by m***@sky.com
I have an old Kindle which will handle .txt files, and which
appears as a USB drive when plugged in to a computer. Stuff
that I download from Project Gutenberg or buy from Baen I
turn into .txt and copy to the documents folder of the
Kindle. Sometimes that garbles a few non-ascii characters,
but I usually don't care about that (It did become slightly
irritating with "Mission to Methone" where the e is
non-ascii due to an accent).

In Heaven's name, why are you doing that?!? Use the .mobi
downloads from Gutenberg and Baen!

I feel that if I store .txt, or something I can generate txt
from with commonly available software (such as .rtf) then I
can expect everything to work reasonably well, and I'm not at
the mercy of specialised software that might not be supported
in future, or on a different platform. Also, I don't notice
much of a difference in readability between stuff I buy or
download via .txt and stuff I buy from amazon as .azw.

I feel like I should point out that .epubs are HTML in a .zip
file, and HTML is text with tags that are easily stripped out
if need be (and .zips can be opened directly as a file folder
in most OS's).

I run into problems with zipped files intermittently in my
current situation (i.e., without a computer I control other than
my phone).

That's really not a problem with zip files, though, so much as
"computers I can't control" problem.

Post by Joe Bernstein
And this may not be relevant to .epubs, but is relevant to some
things I've encountered lately: there are pseudo-zips too.
These, I routinely have trouble with. (gzip, most obviously.
The most important single reason to run Linux if you can is not
something useful Linux does, it's dealing with the Linux uber
alles assholes who use gzip.)

There is a free program for Windows called 7zip that can handle
damn near anything used for compressing files. It laughs at gzip
(while unzipping it handily). There's even a command line version,
if you need to automate it.

Post by Joe Bernstein
Which is sorta the point. Text editing is wondrously portable;
many other things, less so. Competent text editing needn't
degrade HTML nor for that matter accents, unless your system is
from the 1980s.

As I said. .epub is HTML, which is text. The markup contains
information, and losting is a loss. But it's still ASCII text. And
if it falls entirely out of use, the documentation for it will
still be available. You could write your own renderer if you had
to. Or strip out the markup.

Post by Joe Bernstein
I gather the standard for e-mail is now IMAP.

If you say so. But IMAP isn't a file format, it's a transmission
protocol. And Gmail still has POP3 access available, though I
believe you have to turn it on. (I think you have to turn on IMAP,
too, now that I think about it.)

Post by Joe Bernstein
Sooner or later,
I'll have to use that to download all my Gmail e-mail - and then
find a way to convert it to mbox so I can actually read it, and
process it into permanent storage, using a text editor, more
efficiently than with ever-changing e-mail programs.

Gmail's archive system actually exports to mbox (in a zip file - it
archives *everything*, email, drive, Calandar, Chrome favorites,
Address book, *everything* into 2 GB chunks, but somewhere in there
will an .mbox file) by default, but tgz is also available).

Go to https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout and play around.

The really, really fucked up thing is that mbox is the *only* way
to archive Gmail offline (even on commercial account), but Gmail
can't *import* an mbox file. If I have to dig through an archived
email file for a termed employee, I have to load it into
Thunderbird. Sigh.
--
Terry Austin

Vacation photos from Iceland:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/QaXQkB

"Terry Austin: like the polio vaccine, only with more asshole."
-- David Bilek

Jesus forgives sinners, not criminals.

[unknown]

Post by m***@sky.com

Post by Robert Carnegie
I got a birthday present of a Kindle! Model SY69JL
("Generation 8" apparently); I read that it has wi-fi
and has a screen read-out-er that operates over Bluetooth,
although it doesn't do audio playback (?)
So! What should I want to do now, with it? And what
will I not want to do? Is there a good guide?
I don't particularly want to read "pirated" books.
But I don't want to be limited as to what e-books
I can buy and/or use.
Maybe I should try it out on tongue twisters like
"The Leith police dismisseth us" or "Cimmerian barbarian".

I have an old Kindle which will handle .txt files, and which appears as a

USB drive when plugged in to a computer. Stuff that I download from
Project Gutenberg or buy from Baen I turn into .txt and copy to the
documents folder of the Kindle. Sometimes that garbles a few non-ascii
characters, but I usually don't care about that (It did become slightly
irritating with "Mission to Methone" where the e is non-ascii due to an
accent). I don't know how much of this works with a Generation 8 Kindle,
but I'd be interested to know, because sooner or later my old Kindle
will die.

Tyhat all works on a monder Kindle - but at least copy .mobi files which
habve formatting and will do accents correctly unlike ASCII which does
not have a character for say é Bothe Baen and Gutenburg have .mobi for
all books.

Post by m***@sky.com
(I do buy stuff from Amazon - I just don't want to be limited to that)

[Jack Bohn]

Post by m***@sky.com
I have an old Kindle which will handle .txt files, and which appears as a USB drive when plugged in to a computer. Stuff that I download from Project Gutenberg or buy from Baen I turn into .txt and copy to the documents folder of the Kindle.

Which raises the possibility to generate your own content. My brother carries his reference documents and documents-in-progress for convenient access away from his laptop. (Early on he preferred the Nook, which read .epub that he could generate from WordPerfect. He gave up on them for other reasons.) My 80-year-old mother is a sports fan; during college football and basketball seasons I weekly collate her various sports channel schedules into a .txt list of games and load it onto her Kindle. (I should perhaps find something that I can format .mobi with. I have to check to be sure that the games starting one hour aren't separated by a page break.)

The owner's manuals for your camera, phone, or car can be downloaded in .pdf form, which the Kindle will at least try to display, and could be convenient to have.

[Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha]

Post by Jack Bohn
(I should perhaps find something that
I can format .mobi with.

Calibre is the file format conversion tool of choice even for many
professionals.

It will probably do a passable job ofr creating a .mobi from your
.txt file, or you can compose directly in the edit screen.
--
Terry Austin

Vacation photos from Iceland:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/QaXQkB

"Terry Austin: like the polio vaccine, only with more asshole."
-- David Bilek

Jesus forgives sinners, not criminals.

[Klaus Meinhard]

Post by Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha

Post by Jack Bohn
(I should perhaps find something that
I can format .mobi with.

Calibre is the file format conversion tool of choice even for many
professionals.

I find that the epub format has generally the smallest filesize, is
editable with Calibre, and can be easily converted to mobi, pdf or
whatever by Calibre.

So, to make your own mobi file, convert .txt, .doc, .rtf or .pdf to
.epub. take a look, edit the html code to your prittiness standard, and
then convert to mobi and send to your kindle via usb. All easy within
Calibre.

[Jaimie Vandenbergh]

On Thu, 26 Jul 2018 16:17:00 -0700 (PDT), Robert Carnegie

Post by Robert Carnegie
I got a birthday present of a Kindle! Model SY69JL
("Generation 8" apparently); I read that it has wi-fi
and has a screen read-out-er that operates over Bluetooth,
although it doesn't do audio playback (?)

The difference is text to speech vs playing MP3 audiobooks. Some Kindled
can do one or the other or both, it's terribly inconsistent.

Post by Robert Carnegie
So! What should I want to do now, with it? And what
will I not want to do?

Everyone else has burbled about sources and Calibre. There's another
thing that's useful: In your Amazon account, go to
Your Account
Content And Devices
Devices tab
For the line with your Kindle, hit the [...] button on the left
You will see an email address.

That's the email address of your kindle. Send compatible documents to
that address and they'll get autoconverted to something it can read.
Word, RTF, txt, etc. You need to authorise your own email address to be
allowed to send to it though. Full instructions at:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201974220

This has an additional benefit, in that if you manually copy to your
kindle or use Calibre etc over the wire, then that doc is on the Kindle
but that's it. Using the email puts the doc into your Amazon account and
can be read in any of your Kindle hardware or software things. As far as
I know that's the only way to do that with your own docs.

Cheers - Jaimie

[Robert Carnegie]

Post by Jaimie Vandenbergh
On Thu, 26 Jul 2018 16:17:00 -0700 (PDT), Robert Carnegie

Post by Robert Carnegie
I got a birthday present of a Kindle! Model SY69JL
("Generation 8" apparently); I read that it has wi-fi
and has a screen read-out-er that operates over Bluetooth,
although it doesn't do audio playback (?)

The difference is text to speech vs playing MP3 audiobooks. Some Kindled
can do one or the other or both, it's terribly inconsistent.

Post by Robert Carnegie
So! What should I want to do now, with it? And what
will I not want to do?

Everyone else has burbled about sources and Calibre. There's another
thing that's useful: In your Amazon account, go to
Your Account
Content And Devices
Devices tab
For the line with your Kindle, hit the [...] button on the left
You will see an email address.
That's the email address of your kindle. Send compatible documents to
that address and they'll get autoconverted to something it can read.
Word, RTF, txt, etc. You need to authorise your own email address to be
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201974220
This has an additional benefit, in that if you manually copy to your
kindle or use Calibre etc over the wire, then that doc is on the Kindle
but that's it. Using the email puts the doc into your Amazon account and
can be read in any of your Kindle hardware or software things. As far as
I know that's the only way to do that with your own docs.
Cheers - Jaimie

Thanks for that, and thank you to everyone else.
And, implicitly: I'm taking it that options aren't
reduced by, say, creating an Amazon account on a PC
(would that be right?) or by letting the Kindle
use my home wi-fi - all the other things basically
can still be done alongside that?

Actually I only have wi-fi: from a little mobile-network
box. Not from using my neighbours'!

I use moderately strong random passwords; since various
services are fussy about passwords in different annoying
ways, I use 2 numerals and 6 distinct consonants, one a
capital and sometime a ! if they insist. And, as far
as possible, each password is completely different.
I can remember, and type, most of them. I tried using
the bible for codes but it's surprisingly repetitive...

[m***@sky.com]

Post by Robert Carnegie

Post by Jaimie Vandenbergh
On Thu, 26 Jul 2018 16:17:00 -0700 (PDT), Robert Carnegie

Post by Robert Carnegie
I got a birthday present of a Kindle! Model SY69JL
("Generation 8" apparently); I read that it has wi-fi
and has a screen read-out-er that operates over Bluetooth,
although it doesn't do audio playback (?)

The difference is text to speech vs playing MP3 audiobooks. Some Kindled
can do one or the other or both, it's terribly inconsistent.

Post by Robert Carnegie
So! What should I want to do now, with it? And what
will I not want to do?

Everyone else has burbled about sources and Calibre. There's another
thing that's useful: In your Amazon account, go to
Your Account
Content And Devices
Devices tab
For the line with your Kindle, hit the [...] button on the left
You will see an email address.
That's the email address of your kindle. Send compatible documents to
that address and they'll get autoconverted to something it can read.
Word, RTF, txt, etc. You need to authorise your own email address to be
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201974220
This has an additional benefit, in that if you manually copy to your
kindle or use Calibre etc over the wire, then that doc is on the Kindle
but that's it. Using the email puts the doc into your Amazon account and
can be read in any of your Kindle hardware or software things. As far as
I know that's the only way to do that with your own docs.
Cheers - Jaimie

Thanks for that, and thank you to everyone else.
And, implicitly: I'm taking it that options aren't
reduced by, say, creating an Amazon account on a PC
(would that be right?) or by letting the Kindle
use my home wi-fi - all the other things basically
can still be done alongside that?
Actually I only have wi-fi: from a little mobile-network
box. Not from using my neighbours'!
I use moderately strong random passwords; since various
services are fussy about passwords in different annoying
ways, I use 2 numerals and 6 distinct consonants, one a
capital and sometime a ! if they insist. And, as far
as possible, each password is completely different.
I can remember, and type, most of them. I tried using
the bible for codes but it's surprisingly repetitive...

I have used Kindle apps on PC and Android infrequently without obvious consequence. I like to keep my Kindle on Airplane mode and transfer files to it via USB because I don't think it is any business of Amazon what I read or what sections I highlight. One of the things to remember when using the bible for generating information securely is that your exact translation is probably available online, and the bible is the classic text for such things, so if anybody is going to try guessing passwords or trying to find how a compromised password is generated, the bible is probably one of the first texts they would look for matches in.

[Jaimie Vandenbergh]

On Fri, 27 Jul 2018 15:16:09 -0700 (PDT), Robert Carnegie

Post by Robert Carnegie
And, implicitly: I'm taking it that options aren't
reduced by, say, creating an Amazon account on a PC
(would that be right?) or by letting the Kindle
use my home wi-fi - all the other things basically
can still be done alongside that?

Right - you can copy stuff on by wire, or you can email them to your
@kindle.com address, or you can purchase them from Amazon itself. None
of these things will clash. The latter two will put them into your pool
of available downloads onto any Kindle device/app you're logged into.

Cheers - Jaimie

[Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha]

Post by Robert Carnegie
Thanks for that, and thank you to everyone else.
And, implicitly: I'm taking it that options aren't
reduced by, say, creating an Amazon account on a PC
(would that be right?) or by letting the Kindle
use my home wi-fi - all the other things basically
can still be done alongside that?

For stuff gotten from Amazon, I believe they have the technical
ability for publishers to restrict the number of devices (including
the PC app) that a particular book can be downloaded to. And that
number can (IIRC) be one.

I don't recall that it turns up much, though.
--
Terry Austin

Vacation photos from Iceland:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/QaXQkB

"Terry Austin: like the polio vaccine, only with more asshole."
-- David Bilek

Jesus forgives sinners, not criminals.

[Jesper Lauridsen]

Is there a Linux equivalent of Calibra?

[Ted Nolan <tednolan>]

Post by Jesper Lauridsen
Is there a Linux equivalent of Calibra?

Assuming you mean Calibre, it's its own Linux equivalent.