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Hey book barn, long time reader (but not of your sub just like books in general), first time poster. If there's a better thread for this question point me to it. Does anyone here have any experience with Kubo.com? Humble has a Terry Pratchett bundle that I want to get, but it's fulfilled through Kubo. I don't know what kind of DRM they have and I don't want to be locked into yet another app, and worse it looks like they push their own reader (which from what I can tell is a cheap android tablet) pretty heavily. Here's what I want: normal file types (.epub or .mobi ideally) that I can throw at my existing apps and hardware. The ability to just download the files and stick them on my home server so I can have them on hand without having to remember which digital library I picked them up from. Basically I want to know how onerous and annoying Kobi's DRM scheme is.
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Jan 21, 2024 16:05
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| # ¿ May 2, 2024 07:27 |
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Thanks for the info. So just to be clear, I'm not getting normal file formats directly from Kobo, but would have to de-DRM it myself. After that would it be good to go as far as formatting etc. goes, or is this one of those situations where you end up with funky paragraphs and chapter headers? Humerus posted:Downloading from Kobo will give you a .acsm file for Adobe Digital Editions that has the DRM on it Am I to gather from this that I'd have to gently caress with Adobe? Because I really want to avoid having anything to do with Adobe, my god they suck.
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Jan 21, 2024 19:11
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Thanks for the info.
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Jan 22, 2024 00:59
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Comfy Fleece Sweater posted:The promise of ebooks has been largely unfulfilled imo. I mean, they're... "ok", at best, just another format to read, but everything around them kinda... sucks. The DRM, the price (sometimes more expensive than a physical copy!), the lock-in (can't lend or borrow), crappy default typography (which tbh is kinda bad, even if Amazon has improved a bit on this front), crappy editions (good luck reading a badly formatted ebook). Some parts of ebooks (official versions!) can even be outright broken, like footnotes. Even the screens haven't improved much, just a mediocre gray unevenly lit screen (backlit, if you're lucky). Slow "page turns". Etc. All of this is true, but there is one thing that I do love about e-books, and that is that I can carry around an entire loving library on the device that I already have in my pocket for calling people and browsing the forums while taking a poo poo. I will be the first person to recognize that I really, really should have gotten a dedicated reader years ago, but I still prefer physical copies when I can get them for most "serious" reading. But gently caress around time sitting in a subway or on an airplane? Man, it's nice to not have to carry an extra thing around. Which is a big part of why I seek out copies without much in the way of DRM, because it's much easier for me to manage for me with my habits that don't include anyone's bespoke hardware.
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Jan 24, 2024 14:25
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Seriously, I'm legit envious of that guy. I think I've given the trilogy a re-read about once every four-five years since I was in middle school.
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Feb 15, 2024 20:18
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cumpantry posted:did he read the hobbit first? Telling someone over the age of 12 to read the Hobbit first is just cruel.
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Feb 18, 2024 03:57
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Antivehicular posted:??? It’s fine but it really only shines if you’re already invested in the source material. It ends up feeling like a YA novel in a lot of ways and I’ve known more than one person put off by it. Myself included I’ll add. I was one of those fifth graders reading Tom Clancy novels and a relative recommended the hobbit to me. It probably delayed me reading LotR by at least two years, because it just felt flat and kind of dull.
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Feb 18, 2024 14:20
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Gaius Marius posted:You've not read YA if you think The Hobbit is even minutely comparable in craft I’m not talking about craft. I’m sure it’s very competently constructed. Frankly I don’t really have the background to get critical about writing non fiction on a craft level. The story just comes off as simplistic, a little boring, and in general something where you can tell it was written with children as the intended audience. Fell flat with me. I’ve tried going back a few times and it just never grabs me. I’m sure it’s a very well written book, but it’s one I don’t find enjoyable especially compared to the trilogy.
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Feb 18, 2024 16:50
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Whole thing as a kid, about half as an adult before I tossed it.
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Feb 18, 2024 17:34
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Turbinosamente posted:Good question (I assume you mean the 8 trillion postit notes and 4 bookmarks she's got in that thing). I never do it, nor do I scribble notes in the margins. The sole exceptions are marking recipes I want to try in cook books and my favorites in an art history coffee table book that's big enough to kill a man with. This is going to depend entirely on the purpose of the reading. If you're reading something for pleasure, yeah there really isn't much need for marginalia of any kind, be it scribbled or on post it notes. But if you're going to have to interact with a text in any kind of critical or analytical way after reading it then those kind of notes about what you thought as you were going through it are invaluable. The "serious" portion of my library - mostly books I had to interact with as part of grad school or in relation to my own research projects - are fully of margin notes and dog ears. I'm not much one for post it notes, mostly because they can be removed, but I've had friends who were big on them. Everyone develops their own technique that really only makes sense to them. That said, you also see a TON of cargo culting of these methods, especially from students. Anyone who has ever bought a used undergrad history book has seen the ones where entire paragraphs - sometimes entire pages - are highlighted with is just worthless as a form of annotation. Active reading and taking notes - including marking up books themselves - are real skills and ones that are rarely taught at any level. Which is all to say that yeah, maybe she's just marking up everything because she has no idea how to take good notes and thinks more = better, but it could also be that she's putting together a fairly rigorous review or critique of it and that's just her process. I have no idea who she is or what kind of critic she is, so I'm not going to try and figure out if her note system is functional or for show.
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Mar 18, 2024 16:00
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3D Megadoodoo posted:I might write (in pencil) in the margins, I use ink, I give zero fucks. It's a book, and books are either tools or entertainment, and I'm fine with leaving my mark on both. edit: that said, I keep all my marks to the margins, because nothing annoys me more than underlining that ends up obscuring the text because people are'nt robots and we're not good at making a straight line for that long. Maybe, maybe I'll underline one word or a short phrase if it's utterly vital but for the most part anything important can be noted in the margins.
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Mar 18, 2024 16:10
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StrixNebulosa posted:fwiw as a purchaser of used books, I find it adorable to find written notes in the books, provided they don't make it impossible to read the text. It can also be fascinating if you follow along with the other person's thought process. Doubly so if you know them. There's one book I remember from grad school where the list of people who had checked it out went 1) My advisor in the 90s 2) a grad student of his in the early 00s who is now one of the leading experts in that field 3) me. Once I figured out who's notes were who's based on handwriting it was pretty fun to follow along and add my own. Plus I got to look smart as hell when I brought up some of his own points in a later discussion. 
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Mar 18, 2024 16:15
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3D Megadoodoo posted:I like pencils in general because there's no chance it'll bleed or leave an indentation that can be seen from the other side. (Unless you press real hard I guess. I use B or 2B so that's not necessary.) Also pencil marks don't fade, ever, unlike many inks. See, I come at it from the other direction: most pencil is too light to really stand out against the page, especially when up against nice, dark printed letters. So it always ends up being had to see my notes. I just make sure to use inks that aren't going to bleed. Ink fading isn't really a problem on time scales less than a human life span unless it's either exposed to UV light (which being inside a book avoids) or it's just the shittiest ink imaginable. It can happen, I've got a few notebooks that I need to transcribe or at least scan because they're fading badly from a time period where I was using the cheapest garbage ink imaginable, but it's not something I worry about too much.
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Mar 18, 2024 16:18
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Gaius Marius posted:This is the most depressing thing I've ever read. Why? This is the way that the vast, vast majority of people have interacted with literature since literacy became widespread. Most people approach it as entertainment and leave it at that. Hell there was a moral panic in the 19th century over the penny dreadful and how frivolous it was.
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Mar 20, 2024 14:11
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Mrenda posted:I was specifically talking about serials, and how it's highlighting issues elsewhere. I feel it's partly because the story can't be read to completion in one sitting, if the reader chooses to do so. They're limited by a release schedule, so each "episode" must contain and achieve certain things. The problem is how willing people are to stretch their ideas of whether the story is satisfying those things. And that'll differ for each reader. Oh got you, I missed somehow it was in reference to the serial thing you mentioned before. Is there any indication of how people handled serials back when they had their first big moment in 19th century papers? I'm thinking of Dickens etc.
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Mar 20, 2024 15:44
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| # ¿ May 2, 2024 07:27 |
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Mrenda posted:My fear is this carries over into "wider" reading tastes. You already have readers saying they put down books when someone said something nasty. Or did something they didn't like. No matter how the novel deals with it. As I write more I'll see about editing my stuff into novel form, and I wonder what the reception will be then. When people can keep reading the entire story until they're satisfied, not because the next part hasn't been published. I don't know if this is more prevalent today, but I suspect it's something that has always been there to some extent. Purely anecdotal, but my Grandmother does that and apparently has her entire life. She's also very much an incurious woman who tries to avoid anything she doesn't think is 'nice,' something that has very much been a problem in other aspects of her life. Something I think is important to keep in mind when looking at the state of literature (or anything else) and comparing it to how things used to be is that there is an incredible amount of survivorship bias. The books from the late 19th or early 20th centuries that are still read today are read for a reason - they're classics. But if you really go digging around there is a lot of just garbage written that people gobbled up. Here's one example that I'm aware of because my dad has an old copy: The Lone Star Ranger, one of the best selling novels in 1915. It's poo poo. Like, bad Hardy Boys novel level of crap. This wasn't a WW1 eara YA book, either, this was broad audience literature. It's just bottom tier, pulpy, poo poo adventure story pap and it sold like gang busters. Well enough, glancing at that wikipedia page, that it was made into a movie 4 times between the 20s and 40s. Meanwhile 1915 is the same year that Kafka published The Metamorphosis (yes I know, short story, not quite apples to apples, insert a better example here). Basically, we've always had huge volumes of garbage churned out to entertain people while they ride the subway to work, it's just that we're more aware of the stuff coming out today than we are the books that fell into obscurity a century ago.
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Mar 20, 2024 17:23
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