By @edent · ebook HTML unicode · 2 comments · 300 words
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · ebook epub HTML rant · 700 words · read ~193 times.
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · drm ebook libraries · 9 comments · 500 words · read ~153 times.
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · drm ebook MSc · 3 comments · 450 words · read ~7,008 times.
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Adobe drm ebook linux ubuntu · 10 comments · 250 words · read ~4,256 times.
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. […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Adobe drm ebook · 900 words · read ~587 times.
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · android ebook eink ereader HowTo koreader linux · 3 comments · 250 words · read ~290 times.
(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, […]
Continue reading →By @edent · digital ebook MSc · 1 comment · 700 words · read ~159 times.
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · bug ebook epub NaBloPoMo publishing standards · 950 words · read ~206 times.
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · academia ebook piracy publishing · 1 comment · 300 words · read ~231 times.
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 […]
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