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Getting an eReader


natra

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I tried one of those 汉王 devices at a bookstore. There was a lot of lag and generally seemed like a buggy device. I occasionally see people using the Kindle here in Shanghai. It looks like a very attractive device. I didn't realize how thin it is based on the pictures.

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  • 4 weeks later...

From Amazon.co.uk's page for the updated Kindle:

Support for New Characters

Kindle can now display Cyrillic (such as Russian), Japanese, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), and Korean characters in addition to Latin and Greek scripts.

I think I'd want to see how it actually handles a Chinese pdf before committing, but at just over a hundred pounds now I'm somewhat tempted.

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At first I used to love the idea of the Kindle and wanted to buy one, but after a while of thinking about it the Kindle is only useful for reading straight text. For anything other than pure text it completely bombs. That means that you probably can't read any magazines on it, nor any books with illustrations, nor even any technical books like software development books because those usually include different formatting/color combination's to differentiate information. Then you have the issue of zooming and panning any pages, which for a 1second refresh time is completely unusable.

If you think you can get past these downsides then go for the Kindle, otherwise in my opinion get an iPad. You can read full color and fully illustrated PDF's, listen to audiobooks, chinese podcasts, movies...etc.

For the difference in price between the Kindle and the lowest iPad model($500), there is a lot of value to be had. Or if you can wait a few months to see what RiM has in store for their Blackberry tablets(google BlackPad for more info) as well as the other manufacturers bringing out tablets based on the Android platform.

For me? I'll definitely be getting an iPad from a purely pragmatic standpoint without any Apple fanboyism.

Hope this helped.

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I've been using a Kindle DX for about six months now. Chinese text is ok as long as you save and view it as pdf. Practically speaking, almost anything you upload that doesn't come from Amazon has to be pre-formatted to some extent for optimal viewing. The refresh time is usually less than one second, about the time it takes to turn a page of a paper book. The nicest thing about ereaders, and large screens like the DX in particular, is that they're very easy on the eyes - you can read for hours without tiring. I love some Apple products (I couldn't live without a Macbook) but I doubt I could read a novel cover to cover on an Ipad.

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  • 4 weeks later...
These pictures of the Kindle's browser have also got me tempted. Even if it's just mobile / text-heavy sites it can handle, it would be very nice to have those on an e-ink display. But when you've got touchscreen colour e-ink displays in the works, I think I'll have to sit on my hands for a while . . .
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I have an iPod Touch. Besides Stanza, Instapaper and ByLine are good apps for storing web content for offline reading. If you have a lot of PDFs to read, DropBox is a simple way of transferring them onto the device (doesn't work in China, though). Also, Pleco offers a nice Perapera-kun style interface for reading Chinese text with helpful annotations.

I think the continually dropping price of the Kindle is a signal that iOS devices have won. I also don't think Amazon really cares that much because they will continue making money from the Kindle app for iOS.

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  • 1 month later...

I'm now the proud owner of a Kindle, and I've got to say I'm pretty happy. I haven't sat down and done any extended reading sessions with it yet, but the screen is great fun and I'm very pleased to see that the browser is actually quite usable if you set it up for mobile sites - the new mobile Gmail works very nicely, although obviously I'm not going to be typing up any long replies.

As far as Chinese goes, I've tried converting a couple of files. PDFs seem to convert very well (these are just plain text though, anything with columns and images would be a different matter) and you can then adjust text size, etc, to suit. My first attempt at converting a Word document was a bit of a failure - this was a simplified document, but any character that has a traditional equivalent - 东,录, 问题 ended up as a box. I'm not sure if for some reason it thought it was a traditional document, this problem could perhaps be worked around. However, converting the Word doc to PDF (which Word 2010 does natively) and then converting that to Kindle format worked perfectly.

The actual display of Chinese is good, but could be better - you get little oddities like characters being slightly out of line, or appearing to be slightly bolder than their neighbours. It's a little distracting, not sure if it's a fatal error though. Would be interesting to compare side by side with one of the Chinese devices.

Turning on text-to-speech on a Chinese document gets you a very rapid list of all the numbers. Can't see that being too useful.

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Roddy, welcome to the Kindle club. ;)

Chinese is supported natively now with Kindle 3 (firmware 3.0).

To fix the encoding problem, you need to switch the locale to Simplified Chinese. There's some confusion with Unicode and GB, I think.

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=99078

1. Press Home

2. Type ;debugOn , press Enter key

3. Type ~changeLocale zh-CN , press Enter key

4. Type ;debugOff, press Enter key

5. Restart Kindle in Settings (Press Menu, Select Settings, Then Press Menu to select "Restart")

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=100218

K3 chinese font support spotty?

There's also a new firmware out, which improves overall speed, particularly browser speed

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_navbox_top_kindlelgi?nodeId=200529700

Kindle firmware update

I've found that for image-based PDF, if you trim the white margins, the pages are pretty readable in landscape orientation. You can use BRISS for the margin trimming. It's very easy to use and quick.

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=83053

PDF cropping software: BRISS

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Instapaper works with Kindle, but only spottily.

http://www.instapaper.com/user/kindle

On your Kindle management page on amazon.com,

- Set Maximum individual charge limit to US $0.01

- Add "@instapaper.com" (no quotes) to Your Kindle Approved E-mail List

I've been able to get my articles saved on Intapaper sent to the Kindle by hitting the "Send now" button on the Instapaper page above, but I haven't been able to get the automatic daily/weekly delivery working. In principle, if the former works, the latter also should work.

You can also download your Instapaper articles in Kindle or EPUB format from the Instapaper site. Unfortunately, their Kindle file doesn't include a Table of Contents, but the EPUB file does. If you want, you can download the EPUB file and convert it into a MOBI Kindle file with the program Calibre.

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Excellent Gato, thanks. I'm thinking the spacing issue I mention is probably a justification one, so I'm trying this

Edit. Didn't work, so I'm attaching an image - do you see similar things? Ie, after 了 in the first line. It happens at all font sizes, typefaces, etc.

post-3-021616400 1287560741_thumb.jpg

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I just checked after you mentioned the spacing issue. Actually I see the same issue, whether the text I have is from a MOBI file or converted from a PDF. At smaller font sizes, it's only noticeable if you really look for it.

I've attached a photo with a story by A Cheng loaded. You can see that on the sixth line down, the '的' in "满嘴的" is misaligned. And two more lines down, the 特 in 莫扎特 is also misaligned. There are a few others down the page, but it's only a minor issue and doesn't really detract from the reading.

By the way, why are your margins so wide?

I just found out about this setting, which I haven't tried yet.

http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle_HowTo:_Change_Margin

Kindle HowTo: Change Margin

post-879-060984200 1287562568_thumb.jpg

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Yeah, I guess I'll get used to it. Although I'm still wondering if there's some way of fixing it. There's a font to let you choose your own fonts I think, doubt that'll help but I'll likely end up trying it anyway at some point.

The margins is just me figuring out what line length I feel comfortable with.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I also got a Kindle! I installed the font hack because I couldn't get it to display Chinese otherwise. It mostly works perfectly, except for these hyphen marks that have a unicode ordinal of 9472 (hex is 2500). Here is what the hyphen is supposed to look like:

Instead, on my Kindle it ends up looking like a question mark in a box. Has anyone else encountered this, and knows what the fix is?

@gato:

I don't have a camera handy to take a picture, but the font from the font hack looks the same as in your screenshot. I have the 3.0.2 firmware.

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The "font hack" requires jailbreaking your Kindle 3, right?

Kindle 3 (firmware version 3.x) supports Chinese natively. It's got some issue with encoding for simplified Chinese (might be GB), but if you use the "debug hack" I referred to above, it should be able to display simplified Chinese perfectly, without any jailbreaking.

http://www.mobilerea...ead.php?t=99078

1. Press Home

2. Type ;debugOn , press Enter key

3. Type ~changeLocale zh-CN , press Enter key

4. Type ;debugOff, press Enter key

5. Restart Kindle in Settings (Press Menu, Select Settings, Then Press Menu to select "Restart")

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@gato:

Yes, I did try that, but I must've messed up one of the steps. I figured that I would probably jailbreak the thing anyway, so as part of that I did the font hack.

Reading further into the issue with the hyphen, it looks like the CJK.ttf file included in the font hack probably doesn't include that character. It's not that big of a deal though, I can probably just do a global text replace and replace the "oriental hyphen" with a normal hyphen.

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So I took the plunge and switched from the nook to the Kindle. I'm loving it so far and wish I would have switched sooner.

Regarding the CJK.ttf font in the font hack: you can replace it with any font of your choosing (my personal favorite is Kaiti), just rename the font CJK.ttf and overwrite the font hack's CJK.ttf.

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