Re: Aftermarket Afterlife by seanan McGuire

On Wed, 2 Oct 2024 17:36:59 -0000 (UTC), jdnicoll@panix.com (James
Nicoll) wrote:

In article <nerqfj1mu6jcl1hb3bdci9jdkberc1p2g9@4ax.com>,
Paul S Person  <psperson@old.netcom.invalid> wrote:

On Wed, 2 Oct 2024 13:13:43 -0000 (UTC), jdnicoll@panix.com (James
Nicoll) wrote:
>

In article <cb4ofj9g8ue4sj46q3pfm1chk97fbk4qkn@4ax.com>,
Paul S Person  <psperson@old.netcom.invalid> wrote:

On Mon, 30 Sep 2024 17:54:36 -0500, Lynn McGuire
<lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:
>
<snippo>
>

I just do not have shelf space for hardbacks.

I do mostly Kindle books now, as my bookshelves are quite full.
>
But my experience with the Kindle edition of /From Hell/ showed me
that Kindle is not really suited to graphic novels, manga, art books,
and similar items. So I still get them, on rare occasions, in paper.
>
And in paperback when possible. But a lot of times it is not possible,
or at least inconvenient for various reasons, I then I get hardback.
Generally at unbelievable expense, I might add.

>
Alton Brown would no doubt berate me for having a unitasking
device but I have enough ttrpg material in PDF, and enough
of it is double-columned, a pain in the ass to read in PDF
on a laptop, that I picked up a 12.4 inch tablet on sale.
Filled up 200 GB of its 250 GB memory already.

>
Multicolumn PDF files are another category that, in my experience,
doesn't work very well on a Kindle.
>

Ages ago, I was sent a double-columned PDF from Haikasoru, which
I dutifully converted to Epub and imported to my Kobo. I don't
know what I expected Calibre to do with two columns but what it
actually did was treat them as one column. Oddly, the resulting
mess was more readable than you'd expect. It took me a couple of
pages to realize it was not a bold stylistic choice.

I forget what Kindle did with the PDF files I tried, but it wasn't
pretty.

Ironically, a reader that treats them as one column by showing first
the left column and then the right column would probably have worked
just fine. Well, except for the PDF pages that didn't have two columns
but did have lines too wide to display properly. But broken lines that
are supposed to flow together in a paragraph are much less distracting
than intermixed text.

A couple of Deaver books came with a setup (font, font size, line
spacing -- it may have any or each of them)  I didn't like all that
much. When I set it up the way I wanted it, the last two lines of each
screen were often repeated at the top of the next. When I reverted to
their setup, this didn't happen. I suspect the pages were formatted so
that only their setup would actually work. Since the Kindle is clearly
intended to allow the user to change the setup, making it possible for
a book to be locked into a specific format in this way is, IMHO, a
poor design decision on the part of Amazon.

Similarly, if the magnification-to-blurriness referred to earlier is
the result of how Kindle handles /all/ images, then some control of
this needs to be provided and used to avoid the defects it produces.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"