That’s fair. I get around that by giving Calibre its own directory and then importing ebooks into it - duplicating the ebooks, but given that they’re usually 1mb each it’s not that big of a deal.
I actually don’t use it very much for reading ebooks on my PC, but for removing DRM and putting ebooks on my Kindle, it really can’t be beaten.
Interesting, But I hope this new Kindle Voyager can add a new app for managing notes. I’ve use my Kindle paper white for my blogs and notes. I hope they will plug some application like clippings.io for managing notes, this app is very useful for everyone who love to blog like me.
This new Kindle does look very shiny, but I’ve got a Nook and an old 3G Kindle which both still work fine, so I can’t really justify it.
I’m more interested in finding somewhere that I can buy ebooks from in the UK that isn’t amazon and isn’t a monumental faff. DRM only bothers me if it’s no crackable via Calibre and Apprentice Alf (not found any so far), but every store I’ve tried so far either doesn’t sell to the UK, doesn’t carry any of the books I want to buy, or makes it such a long winded process to actually get the book I just give up and click the “buy now for Kindle” button on Amazon and have the book downloaded and unDRM’d within 5 minutes.
ebook-convert “My Very Important.epub” /Volumes/Kindle/mvie.mobi
Still not supporting ePub IS kind of annoying after all these years. Pretty much out of spite too, as the ‘send to kindle’ app you mention is compatible with a bunch of common text formats and even uneditable Adobe PDF, but not the one open ebook standard everyone else uses and publishes with. What purpose does this exclusion serve?
And people may love Calibre, but I don’t. Having to convert ePub to .mobi is an ugly kludge to solve a problem that has no right to exist.
You’re right, it is annoying. I just think it is somewhat misleading to imply that somehow the kindle can only be used to read books sold through Amazon, even if that is what 90% of kindle users do. More can be done to educate people about alternatives than simply harping on the lack of ePub support.
As for Calibre, I don’t love it so much as I love what it can do, which is convert all kinds of text in to Amazon format, and most importantly strip DRM from books purchased from Amazon. It’s not the most elegant software, but it does the job at filling in when Amazons own conversion can’t or won’t.
I see that Amazon will have new library sharing options: Kindle’s new ‘Family Library’ feature links Amazon accounts for content sharing - GeekWire
I had created a new account that the wife and I use just for the Kindle so that we could easily share books (also makes it easier for me to back up all of the books via Calibre) – this will at least make it easier for her to purchase books without having to sign into our shared account.
Through my own stupidity, my Kindle Paperwhite got launched into the centre of a campfire and stayed there for thirty seconds or so until I realised and kicked it out. It was too hot to touch for about 10 minutes, and the power button melted down into a spike that needed filing down, but it all still works perfectly a year or so later.
The display survived surprisingly well. I expected more damage. Apparently the active layer is somewhat more robust than the liquid crystal based ones.
There is a life outside big libraries’ electronic readers. For exemple, Pocketbook provide excellent high end readers that are open (they got a micro-sd slot for 32 Go memory extension and can read about fifteen kinds of files).
To be honest, I was disappointed by their entry-level offers, but the last one I bought (a Touch Lux 2 to replace both my broken old Pro 602 and Aqua) is very good, with an excellent resolution, reactivity and battery life.
It accepts without trouble the books I’m buying at Amazon, and also all the others I didn’t bought.
And since it got a very clever Dropbox integration, I have probably more things to read that I will ever have the time to.
Has anyone seen one up close? I’m wondering What 300dpi resolution does to the experience vs. Paperwhite’s 220(I think). Apart from “now the smallest font size is more readable”.
Did they do anything to improve the typography of the page or do we get the same optimized-for-screen-resolution typefaces, clunky-but-it-works margins and spacings and all the other design limitations of the older technology?
There’s an opportunity for fine improvements in legibility and even beauty with better screens instead of rendering the exact same stuff with crisper pixels.
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