Did I get memed into buying a Kindle? I've downloaded a dozen books from Amazon's own store and half of them aren't even scanned properly or proofread for basic issues. Calibre never creates decent files for me on any setting.
After conversion, the line breaks are everywhere, mostly mid-sentence. The page breaking is even worse. I have spent hours trying to find a decent version of even one single desired book and get it to format correctly.
Money is really not an issue for me, I would pay happily $20-30+ for working ebooks from a reliable source, there just isn't one. How is this any easier or more convenient than a real book? Paper books always work, you can obtain any edition or translation, they look great on a shelf, feel good in your hands, you can carry them anywhere and they never need to charge.
Fuck ebooks.
>>7730521
If money isn't an issue for you, I have no idea why you'd even want an e-reader. People only get them as an alternative print books because they're too poor to afford them.
urgghhh, so sick of these printing house shills
>>7730530
or for mobility
>>7730530
nope, they're lighter and easier to read too. imo
>>7730521
Who fucking cares about all that? It's not like you pay for that digital file anyway, as long as you understand what it says it's good.
>>7730536
>>7730570
This is a paid ebook from the Kindle store. I've tons more of these with equally disappointing issues. Further, I haven't been able to produce a single ebook in Calibre that wasn't plagued with issues.
>>7730593
I think you might be tech impaired and stupid, why the fuck do you pay for ebooks when you can have them for free?
>>7730593
The fuck did you download? that looks terrible
>>7730593
Looks like your shit is damaged or you downloaded the worst ebook out there
>>7730593
Did you download a pdf file instead of a mobi or epub? This doesn't look right at all...
>>7730602
>ancient translations with atrocious quality
>hours of labour formatting, adjusting and tweaking
>free
Some of us actually want to spend our time digesting the greatest feats of literature and working on our magnum opus, not pissing around trying to save a few bucks.
>>7730648
Some of us aren't idiots who don't know where to download stuff.
>>7730521
I experience all the same problems but, hey, I can download pretty much any book I want to and read it for free. I'd obviously prefer reading the paper copy, but I've found the Kindle to be a pretty acceptable compromise. I've got the first model of the Kindle which doesn't have a backlight, and I think that helps.
i honestly don't know why your ebooks have turned out looking like that but what i do:
>find the book on bookzz or libgen in EPUB format
>download and load into calibre
>tweak metadata and choose cover of my choice
>go to convert, on the 'look and feel' tab i change the alignment to justified, then convert to MOBI
>email to kindle
9/10 the book is fine - i still end up with books that are poorly formatted sometimes but i just delete it and try a different upload
I think he is converting pdf to azw3.
>>7730739
Typical /lit/ user.
>>7730739
>converting pdf to azw3.
the absolute madman
ITT: OP is a retard
Never had a single problem with a file or using calibre.
>>7730593
thats a pdf you fucking lyar
What if a X book is only available as pdf? Am I fucked?
>>7731871
maybe.
If it is a document that was saved in pdf format or professionally OCR'd, you can crop out the header, footer, page numbers using adobe portable (there are a million torrents for it) and removing hidden information. Then you can just use calibre or save it as rtf and fix any formatting issues with the replace function. briss also does this, and is free and legal.
if it was scanned or improperly OCR'd, or even worse .djvu>pdf (basically pictures of the pages) you are fucked unless you are a real go-getter and pirate enterprise OCR software (usually hundreds of dollars retail) and go to editing and following the steps above.
>>7730593
>he bought a PDF!
>its just a scan of the physical book!
>he is blaming the digital format and the e-reader itself!
kobo or bust
fuck amazon
>>7731949
Please stop shilling. My Kindle Touch is a great piece of technology that has worked perfectly for the better half of a decade. And since they are made at a loss and i pirate all of my books I havent supported Amazon in the least.
Stop pretending this is /g/, and that we have a moral imperative to support Amazon over a shady japanese zaibatsu.
Ride the Tiger looks pretty fucked up on the kindle. Might of been cause of epub->mobi conversion.
>>7730521
As long as you're using proper ebook formats (epub, mobi, azw3) a properly formatted book should look fine. Shit publishers produce shittily-formatted books though. What books are you buying, and in which editions?
>>7732945
>Rakuten Kobo Inc. is a Canadian company which sells e-books, e-readers, and tablet computers. It is headquartered in Toronto and is a subsidiary of the Japanese e-commerce conglomerate Rakuten.
Yeah, Japanese
>>7731914
I went the custom OCR route myself just to read a PDF comfortably, it's no big deal, just don't expect it to work well without putting work into it if it's scanned pictures.
>>7730787
This. OP can't into calibre.
Those things cost a fortune in my country, sucks.
>>7731980
>Please stop shilling. My Kindle Touch is a great piece of technology
You're probably retarded senpai
Cut your losses and sell it asap.
Kindle is shite. As shite as it could be.
There is no redemption I tell you. NONE!
But seriously though, it's good if you read a lot and don't want to spend a lot of money building a library of paperbacks or hardcover for yourself which would be so awesome by the way!
Do you guys have covers for your kindle/kobo/etc?
Guys I was wondering if buying the basic kindle would be a good choice for a beginner reader. I'm barely literate and would like to try to become less stupid by reading.
The paperwhite seems very expensive for my third world ghetto pocket.
>>7735253
Yes a touch or early gen used one is fine.
The fires are made like garbage, avoid them, and use bookzz.org and btdigg
hurr durr i dont know what pdf is - op
>>7735253
just buy secondhand books or i guess a secondhand basic kindle or paperwhite if you really need the backlight
>>7735253
Get a Paperwhite, seriously. The light is very good even at daytime.
>>7735284
I second this, the light really doesn't fuck with your eyes, or at least mine anyway.
And if you know where to download books and are not tempted to buy one just because it looks nice (I've fallen for this trap) you will save your money in the long run.
I have books I bought years ago and never read that I look at decide I'm going to read and download instead of reading the book I own because I like reading on my Kindle that much more.
>>7734406
No
>>7735253
Yep, it's brilliant of you don't have any income. Pretty much every book worth reading is available for free on the gutenberg project website.
>>7735253
Yeah, do it. Once I realized getting a bunch of books I wanted cost as much as the kindle itself, I stopped thinking about its price. It's worth it in the long run.
>>7734406
yes, mine got significantly scratched in the first week
Honestly I just use plain text and it's fine. People over complicate this stuff.
There's an issue when you need to flip around a lot, but if you're just reading a book cover to cover there's nothing wrong with it. Flippy type books I hate reading on ereaders anyway, regardless of format, so I'll just get the physical book because it's 1000x better.
Bought mine a year ago. Since then i've read at least 50 books on it. Only had a bad conversion twice, both times from a small torrent site(native language books not on amazon), that i had to convert myself from a pdf.
So yeah the Kindle is a piece of shit.
I just download the mobi file or whatever it may be from piratebay or the like, then open it with Adobe reader, or convert it online with a free one if need be and open it that way
Never had a single problem
>>7730593
>paying for a pdf to read on an ereader
1. Is that even possible?
2. Why would you do it?
>>7730521
Yeah, that's why i went back to paper books.
ebooks are new and publishers don't seem to be putting much effort in to it. Formatting issues everywhere and that's if you can get the edition you want in ebook form in the first place. A lot harder to navigate too with things like endnotes, because most of the time publishers are too lazy to hyperlink them, so you have to navigate around anyway, which is a lot harder on a kindle than on paper. Not mention maps being tiny, verse lines being broken incorrectly because the screen is too small ect.
There are some advantages to ebooks, but if you're paying anyway, you might as well just get paper.
>>7732385
90% of the downloads on Bookzz are PDF and it's pretty much impossible to find other formats for most books I searched for.
I'm waiting for the paperwhite to come down in price a little bit, then I'm going to get one.
>>7737430
same. hoping a new one comes out soon or just a price drop
>>7737236
Total lie, between tuebl btdigg bookzz libgen and mobilism I find everything in ereader format except obscure nonfiction, which I format into ePub myself.
>>7737236
99% of all books are available in epub / mobi.
>>7737546
If you only read fiction yes. Most philosophy shit is in pdf.
>>7730521
You can carry war and peace and complete works of shakespeare in your pocket my ass.
>>7730664
This, OP obviously bought third quality Homer with translation from projectgutenberg, formatted by a twelve year old on Kindle store, thinking he is bigger patrician as the rest of us.
At the same time we get the same book in modern translation, beautifully formatted for free. And are also capable of some simple HTML coding allowing us to fix everything, add custom covers, and embed the book with fonts costing up to 2k in moneys.
Seriously guys, do some research before each impulse buy. It's commendable buying books even in epub formats, but like with regular editions, quality varies even here.
>>7737874
Is there a guide on doing this somewhere?
>>7737880
Not him, but between acrobat, mobipocket creator, and calibre you can do most of that shit. If you want to do more fancy stuff (like fonts and justification and stuff) the calibre forums have plenty of resources
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=79ec2793cef76c59e80b4980b635723c&f=262
>>7730521
you got memed in general
i own a rooted nook and pirate everything i want; so far it's been pretty good
Kindle is a fine piece of technology but I find it difficult for extended reading periods.
Maybe I'm just too used to physical books and I've turned into a luddite. Le Guinn said "As a reader, anything longer than a letter or a poem is tiresome for me to read on the screen. I read fast, carelessly, superficially on the screen, and don’t enjoy it. I don’t know why." which is exactly how I feel.
She goes on to remark about habits and people being adaptable so maybe it's just that I'm far too used to reading printed media.
>>7730521
Mate, make sure you are buying RETAIL ebooks. Tons of make-money-online scumbags and Pakistanis and robots just reprint PUBLIC DOMAIN texts and charge YOU money for them! Make sure you check under "Publisher" before buying for established publishers, their ebooks don't have errors.
>>7737783
And history also. Everything in pdf. No super resolution on kindle will help you there, you need 8incher.
>>7737874
>HTML coding
>>7737880
First stop is Calibre. Do what other guy already suggested. You can do pretty much everything there with fairly simple interface. For slightly more advanced tool, primarily used when building your own .epub from scratch, you can go with Sigil. But in it you are not far removed from manually fixing things, so that option may be the better one.
For manually editing things, you only need some basic html coding that can be easily learned. Unprotected .epub can be opened with file unpacker and then messed with. Unprotected .mobi can be converted to .epub and back to .mobi with ease, so it's the same thing. And protected stuff can always be hacked. No company puts much thought into protection anyway, so there's plenty of tools around to do that.
Now, both .epub and .mobi use regular html files for pages, and then styles are saved in .css file. Again this is very simple html coding, and there are plenty of tutorials online, both for html itself or for .epub formatting. Since we are only fooling around with text there, there isn't much to learn. Usually it's just adjusting text. Some tweaking of titles size, putting new fonts in, aligning text. That all can be done just by looking at html files to see what's what, and then editing .css file. These are things that you do already in word processor, so it's all not that harder as learning that. All you need to learn are codes for fooling with text and basic knowledge of how everything fits together.
I went into it completely blank few years back, and now I open pretty much everything, at least to change cover, since publishers and amazon are too cheap to pay original artists, and often include lousy covers.
For pdf you are fucked. Pdf is fixed format file, so at most you can trim some blank space with Adobe Acrobat, or similair pdf editing software. Then you put the reader in horizontal mode, and hope it's readable. You better forget about doing anything more fancy with them, at least if they are in more advanced formatting. Very simple pdf can be converted with Calibre and similar tools, but even here results will need some fiddling with to be satisfactory. Formatting is basically the reason for pdf format of more scientific work. Math formulas, annotations and quotes are easier to work with in pdf.
>>7738649
Take a guess:
http://www.brill.com/search/subject/humanities/subject/history
>>7738649
Do you mean pay for the stuff I get on libgen?
>>7738706
I'm actually considering buying this one, and I'm broke as fuck:
http://www.brill.com/sword-and-crucible
Pirated his Knight and the Blast Furnace, and enjoyed it immensely, so I feel I own the bloke something.
Oh, and the link if for physical copy. Online version is whooping 9€ cheaper. Beat that Amazon!
>>7738706
Heh. But do publishers actually sell books as pdfs at all? Brill doesn't seem to, at least.
>>7738751
Holy shit. Books like that aren't for people to buy, anon. Just get access to a university library that has it if you want to be respectfully legal.
>>7730521
nah
>>7738755
Well, never got to buying anything, but they have e-book section, and the pirated ones are in pdf, so my guess is that they sell pdf.
>>7738761
I'm not British/American, so nothing near. Pirating is the only way to them as I surely couldn't afford to just buy things on a whim. And quality varies considerably, some work is unreadable, total waste of paper, while other is brilliant. There is no knowing one from the other unless you see it for yourself. Google's previews help, though.
