By and large, the English language doesn't use diacritical marks. Even our loanwords are stripped of them; we drink in a cafe rather than the more pretentious café. This has a consequence for HTML and, by extension, eBooks. As a quick primer, modern computing gives us two main ways of displaying a letter with an accent. The first is simple - encode every single accented letter as a separate "pre-composed" character. So è (U+00E8), é (U+00E0), ê (U+00EA, and ë (U+00EB) are all stored as diff…
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As part of my never-ending quest to banish this skeuomorph from the world… I was reading a fascinating eBook recently which was, sadly, designed to mimic a legacy / paper book. To the point where the authoring software had hard-coded in page numbers and forced them to be displayed. Here's what it looked like: There are two abominations here. There's no need to interrupt the reading experience by bisecting a page and displaying the page numbers. And there's no need to put footnotes at the a…
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It's a Friday night in the late 1990s and my teenaged friend group are bored. We're not cool enough to hang about in the park drinking cider. And we're not nerdy enough to play D&D. We don't have enough money to go to the cinema. What we do have is a Blockbuster card and, between us, just enough cash to rent a newly released movie. Eight of us pile into the local Blockbuster and begin to scavenge the shelves. DVDs have yet to appear in our sleepy town, so we hold up chunky VHS boxes for…
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I recently purchased a book for my MSC which was only available via a crappy Android app. There was no obvious way to decrypt it to read on a more sensible device, so I resorted to the ancient art of screenscraping. This is a quick-and-dirty way to grab images of the pages and convert them to a standard PDF using Linux. There's a lot more you can do to make the end book more useful, but this'll get you started Lots of Screen Shots With a USB cable plugged into my phone and laptop, I wrote a…
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After my rant the other day about Adobe Digital Editions, I discovered libgourou by Grégory Soutadé libgourou is a free implementation of Adobe's ADEPT protocol used to add DRM on ePub files. It overcome the lacks of Adobe support for Linux platforms. There are a few limitations, but nothing too serious: Only ePub is supported. No PDF Command line only Alpha quality software. It works - but is a bit finickity You can compile the code yourself, but I just downloaded the pre-built b…
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Adobe's accursed eBook DRM is just the worst. Not only does it lock up books that you have purchased - but it's impossible to use sensibly on Linux. Sure, you can futz around with Docker, WINE, and old versions of Python - and if you're lucky, you might get a book out of it. I wasn't quite so lucky. I wanted to see if I could download an ePub without using Adobe Digital Editions. Spoilers! I couldn't. But this is what I found. The First ACSM file When you buy an eBook, the vendor sends you…
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(Mostly notes to myself) KOReader is the best eReader software I've found. It works beautifully on eInk screens, Android, and Linux. Just a gorgeous - and infinitely customisable - experience. There's one thing I don't like - to move forward a page, you have to click the right of the screen and, to move back, the left. That's fine if you're holding the book in your right hand. But sometimes I behave in a sinister fashion and hold it in my left. I want to tap the bottom of the screen to move…
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I am reading The Digital Transformation Playbook for part of my MSc. It's a good book, but I found this passage about eBooks a little confusing: what about gift giving? No one I have ever asked has thought that an e-book was an acceptable substitute for a printed book when giving a gift. I've received an eBook as a gift (thanks David!) and it was perfectly acceptable. It was nice to receive, and didn't feel like any less than a gift. I got rid of most of my physical books a few…
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Recently, I bought an eBook which has a bug. I'd like to explain what the bug is, why it is a problem, and how I'm trying to get it corrected. Amazon sells eBooks in KF8 format. That is an ePub with some proprietary extras. ePub is a standard based off HTML5. You can read the ePub 3 specification but, basically, it is a .zip of HTML files. If you unzip an eBook, you can read the source code behind it. When trying to read a Kindle book on a non-Kindle device, I noticed a bug. Some words were…
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I don't understand the world of academic publishing. Incredibly niche books, some barely longer than a novella, are sold for ridiculously high prices. Or, worse than that, they're not sold at all. Let me explain. A friend of mine recommended an obscure book, published a couple of years ago. The blurb made it look right up my alley, so I tried to buy it. I only read eBooks, but I couldn't find it anywhere for sale in the UK. Amazon had a listing for a paper copy, but it was permanently out…
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This is a quick guide to adding a new dictionary to your eBook. This uses the English Wiktionary Dictionary. I've tested it on my Likebook Ares and it works! Download the latest dictionary from DictInfo.com. At the time of writing, the latest English version is October 2018 The dictionary file is a .7z file. It's easiest to unzip it on your computer, rather than the eReader. I recommend 7zip. There are three files: wikt-en-en-2018-10-07.ifo wikt-en-en-2018-10-07.idx…
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I'll be upfront, I mostly got this eReader because it's the only one on the market with a USB-C connection. OK! OK! That's not the main reason. It has pretty good support from the manufacturer and a vibrant community around it. Masses of memory, warm lighting, and oodles of space. And, I think, pretty hackable. Quick video Specifications Android 6.0 - with a promise to update it to Android 8.0 Touchscreen with Wacom stylus 1.5GHz CPU 2GB RAM 32GB storage plus a microSD slot 7.8 inch…
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