The eReader Megathread: Yes, all publishers hate Canada

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > The eReader Megathread: Yes, all publishers hate Canada

mystes: May 31, 2006

Ara posted:

For Japanese books: I don't know if this was around before (I sure didn't notice it and the guy who posted the site in the other thread sure didn't notice it), but the Aozora Bunko PDF conversion thing now has a tool where you can enter your own text and it will make it a vertically-formatted PDF, rather than only working for Aozora stuff. Even works with ruby!

The az2tex script it's using to do the actual conversion pretty much worked with any text anyway (in addition to actual aozora ebooks I was using it for stuff like automatically converting newspaper articles) but it is an incredible pain to set up so being able to use this site is a massive improvement.

On the other hand, having to convert to pdfs is sort of annoying. If someone was able to make an epub viewer for kindle I wonder if it would similarly be possible to make an aozora text file viwer?

quote:

Now to wait for an XMDF converter. And for all the big publishing houses to start selling ebooks

Unfortunately I don't know enough to be able to actually reverse engineer the XMDF format but I was previously able to use the program WinAPIOverride32 to get the text out of XMDF books in a really crappy way by intercepting the appropriate text drawing API call (it doesn't work with furigana and you have to scroll through the whole document but that isn't all that difficult if you make the window huge and set the font size to size 4 or something). It looks like after many years sharp has finally updated the viewer program after many years so I don't know if even this would work any more. Of course the bigger problem is that the selection on sites like papyless is horrible because nobody is publishing Japanese ebooks in the first place.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2010 15:15

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 09:06

mystes: May 31, 2006

Foaming Chicken posted:

So if I have a bunch of random ~~chf~~ chm and pdf files, would my best bet be the Kindle? Or is it a matter of how willing I am to work out converting them.

vvv Yes, that's what I meant

I think there are programs that will dump chm into html and you could probably run calibre on the output. It's pretty dumb that people are using a lame decade-old proprietary Microsoft help file format for ebooks though.

mystes fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Apr 21, 2011

# ¿ Apr 21, 2011 03:33

mystes: May 31, 2006

Edit: Never mind. The post I was replying to was kind of old.

# ¿ May 29, 2011 16:21

mystes: May 31, 2006

I think Topaz is kind of a nice idea since it means that ebooks are available for books that wouldn't have them at all otherwise, but they probably should at least tell you before you buy them so that if you can choose whether to buy them accordingly.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2011 21:33

mystes: May 31, 2006

clockworx posted:

Didn't see this posted yet...Amazon to attempt a Netflix-style subscription service for digital books:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/12/amazon-to-launch-netflix-style-service-for-digital-books/

This sounds pretty cool but I wonder if it will actually have books I want to read.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2011 21:53

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 09:06

mystes: May 31, 2006

If the book is in Topaz the sample will also be in Topaz, so you could download it to the PC version and then there's probably some way you could figure out from the file.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2011 13:54

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