My e-reader and I
Officially I'm watching Honey and Clover these days, but I had to go and remember how Romeo x Juliet just hits all the right spots. This list reflects my attempts to find something equally epic in the high fantasy romance genre (Wicked not counted, obviously). The Princess Bride was fun but a wee bit too much on the parody side of things for my tastes. Recs are more than welcome.
Anyway, I've mentioned that I bought an e-reader. I bought it because it purportedly runs three-four weeks on a single charge. I've had enough mobile phones in my life to know that most people - me included - don't change the battery, we change the whole gadget. Particularly in the case of gadgets without replaceable batteries, which is the case with the tablet I bought for the expressed purpose of reading books on. Being some odd degree of environmentally conscious, I realised I could prolong the lifetime of my tablet considerably if I only used it for things my laptop, netbook, mobile, MP3 player and three (four, really) different models of handeld Nintendo couldn't do better. That turned out to be three things: webradio, AMVs and ebooks. As expected, I mostly used the tablet for reading, which soon prompted the pitiful realisation that I had bought the entirely wrong device. Shortly after that: a feeling of glee that I tried to repress, because one thing I definitely don't like about myself is how happy it makes me to buy new gadgets that are usually both expensive and strictly speaking not very useful.
I obviously couldn't get a Kindle because I have principles and Amazon ebooks have extra icky DRM, and I interpreted google's results to be that Sony was only dependable manufacturer who made e-readers that didn't lock my books to devices made by one particular company. Sony, which I've never had much to do with because I'm into Nintendo and Nokia, not because I'm against Sony as such. I don't know if other people have these kinds of feelings about brands (all my laptops have been Fujitsu), but it was a kind of weird feeling; I doubt I'll be getting a Vita anytime soon.
Things to know: It has a touch screen (not a given), it has Wifi (also not a given), it comes with 2GB space for putting your ebooks and for those inclined to read classical shoujo epics on it, you can get a memory card. The OS is some variety of Android and I've seen videos of people successfully running a normal Android UI on it. The screen uses e-ink and is useless for displaying motion - it has got to be a nightmare to use it for doing the kinds of things I imagine people do with their tablets. For those of us who don't hack devices just because we can, the drawbacks of e-ink is mostly just a problem if you insist on using it for browsing the internet. The stamp-sized display of my mobile is better at doing internet than the Reader. The wifi can be used for buying books from the Sony store (which seems to think I live in the UK which makes it impossible for me to register my address and credit card. Good going there, Sony), for borrowing ebooks from public libraries, for reading periodicals, for something or the other with Google books. And for downloading content from Project Gutenberg, as it went for me. That was the simplest procedure of those I've tested: Go to the website, find the book and click the link for "epub". It saved without question and showed up in the right places directly afterwards. Buying books from an independent store was much the same procedure; a different store had some funky download procedure that meant that I had to download the books to my computer and transfer them to the Reader that way.
The supported formats are epub, PDF and text files. I haven't tried to read any text files, but PDFs should be converted to epub before reading. This because most PDF files display text in A4 size, which means tiny letters on your tiny screen and wonky zooming.
Of less relevance, the Reader can also play music, make drawings, and look up words in a number of dictionaries (very convenient when reading German). You can sort your books in "collections"; there is no kind of tag system. On surprisingly useful part is the stylus that comes with the reader: I've used it a lot for underlining and making notes in some books.
1. Reading experience compared to the tablet
I can't really comment on its worth as an e-reader since I hadn't even seen a real one before I bought my own, but I can comment on the reading experience in comparison to the tablet. The obvious difference was the weight: I can no lie on my back without dropping the electronic reading device on my face.
Differences that are relevant to other people would be:
- The tablet is backlit; the Reader requires light just like your normal book
- The Reader is e-ink; bright light is no problem when reading.
- The Reader has physical buttons for turning the page; reading one-handed is a lot easier than on the tablet
- The reader is a lot easier to lug around in regards to weight and depending on the size of your bag, also size. But it's not an easy fit into a pocket.
- The tablet can do a lot of things the Reader cannot (well...)
- You don't have to stress about the battery life with the Reader
All in all: after I got the reader, I've barely touched the tablet.
2. Comics
The UI on the Reader is very, very simple. There is a folder for "music" and one for "pictures", and any picture you put into it is going to go into the "picture" folder. This becomes a problem the moment you want to read a comic with more than one chapter. Comics saved as PDFs, however, go straight to your "books" folder.
So in order to read comics on your Sony Reader, you need to do two things: download them and turn them into PDFs. I used a nifty little program called manga2ebook for doing that. The official downloads seems to have disappeared of the web, but I found it on some filesharing site. There are two downsides to it, though: you first have to zip the whole comic - and this took close to an hour with Basara - and the size of the end product is twice that of the original images. The memory on the Reader holds a lot of books, but if you're going to read a lot of comics on it, it'll probably be best to invest in an SD card. And of course: if the scanlations are saved in irregularly named folders, the program might scramble the chapters.
I was apprehensive of how it'd be to read comics on a display this small, but this was rarely a problem. The PDF displays perfectly and manga, at least, reads well even on the tiny screen. It read better on the tablet since it is more responsive to zooming and it's considerably faster at loading each new page, but the Reader is good enough. I read two lengthy comics on the tablet, and that was in fact what first made me aware of the battery issue.
3. Fanfic
AO3 lets you download fic as epub, and there's this website for the rest of the lot. For LJ fic, my method was to save the fic in question as text files and convert them to epub.