Fair enough :)
Hmm. I never thought about trying to organize them in a series folder.
I just let Calibre do the default folders by author.
One thing that I want to do is for a few books change the metadata to have just the main author because for a given book of a given series it will concatenate all 15 authors-or-writers-or-helpers-or-whatever, and for that reason that book, the third of 5 books, is in a different folder.
I’ll admit this sounds awesome, thank you!
I still don’t think it’s for me though, due to the sort-of-language-barrier. I feel I’d miss out on a lot of the details by trying to listen.
I followed this excerpt well enough because I had already read it.
Even if I understand the words spoken (which is not always the case), and especially for fantasy books where we make up new words (skaa), or invent concepts (burned tin), it makes it harder to follow unless I’m already familiar with them.
As an example of the first reaction when reading, the brain working: “What do you mean, burned tin? Isn’t tin a metal, let me double check. Yes, did he bring a forge? Wait, what, in his … stomach? Ok I guess I’ll understand this better later.”
When I’m reading I pause and continue at my own leisure, when I’m listening I already missed out on the next 20-30 seconds of audio if I’m trying to figure this out or end up forgetting about this to pay attention to those 20-30 seconds. Sure enough, sometimes the explanation comes right after, but not always :)
That being said, this does sound awesome and I may try it for books I already read!
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As for my previous question, which books am I missing from those collections you mentioned 15+?
I checked his bibliography and from what I could tell, either you were talking about another series or some of the short stories such as The Eleventh Metal.
I tried audiobooks only twice for… not even 10 mins each time. Once a proper audiobook read by a human and another time a text-to-speech thing.
They’re not for me, I find myself trying to do something else because I’m “Free” and I just can’t multitask, I can barely pay attention to it and walk.
Furthermore, English is not my native language. While my English is not too poor, it’s an extra mental obstacle, which makes brain have to do some extra gymnastics. When reading in English, I read at my own pace, but when listening … :P
You mentioned in your other comment it’s 15+ books.
Which 15+ ? I’m aware of the two Mistborn eras which are… 3 + 4 = 7.
And I think he wants to write a 3rd Era - but hasn’t.
Maybe you’re including the Stormlight Archives which are 5 if we count Wind and Truth.
Where are the other 3+ I’m missing? :D
Thank you!
Ah yes, I forgot this was a feature Calibre has! When I had only my Kindle I managed to always find mobi for the books I wanted so I only converted one or two books, those for which which I thought the version I found was not good enough.
Assuming the source epub is decent, how good is the converted mobi? Does it ever screw up?
Things like, a chapter heading or paragraphs losing their spacing and/or alignment.
Probably anything will serve, but I would recommend either a Kobo or a Pocketbook for they seem more open (or maybe Onyx, I don’t know this one!). I only ever dabbled with two devices though so I won’t claim I know a lot about the subject. You want to read books with ideally the epub format.
Download the book, connect the e-reader via USB (maybe can be connected in other ways but wtv), copy and paste file, done. (Or use Calibre to manage your library and not do this “hard” step manually).
When you open your device, you will find the book there and you can read it. For any practical purposes this is the most straight forward and means it may not matter that much what you choose. This is to say, provided you find the books you want to read somewhere online, you shouldn’t have troubles reading it in an e-reader. This works in all e-readers as far as I know.
Kindles used to support less formats, specifically not epub which is a book format. They did support mobi which was a good alternative. I read a while ago that they were going to start supporting epub but no idea if it’s the case or not.
Epub is the open format that I go for and probably the best and most compatible. You can edit epubs by modifying HTML and CSS actually, if you know how to open them (hint: Calibre). This, to say, I considered supported book formats to be relevant but maybe they’re not a big problem either.
Edit: Looking at this, it seems that Kindles still don’t support epub. They do support mobi though and like @[email protected] said, we can convert epub to mobi fairly easily, so it’s not a deal breaker, just one restriction that I would personally not want to bother with.
KOReader is a third-party software that you can install on e-readers to provide a more customizable experience. I’m not going to try to convince you it’s good or not, nor that you should install it. I installed it only a couple of months ago.
I’m mentioning it first of because you may be interested but also to point out at its installation method in Kindle, Kobo and Pocketbook. (They also have installation method for Android which I’ll leave out because Android, and Cervantes and reMarkable which I’ll leave out because I don’t even know what these are).
Kindle has to be jailbroken, Kobo seems fairly straightforward with maybe a minor annoyance step and Pocketbook seems straightforward. I have a very old Kindle that I don’t know if it’s supported (didn’t check, cba), and a Pocketbook Touch HD 3. I delayed trying KOReader for a long time because I assumed that it would replace my Pocketbook’s stock software and it serves my purpose well, but on a second glance more recently I realized that the installation steps (copy + paste) didn’t override a single file in my device and KOReader lives side by side as an app in my reader.
For that reason I would suggest either Kobo or Pocketreader.
I forgot about Onyx which @[email protected] mentioned - I only became aware about these recently. I suggest you take a look into this as well, it looks decent but I don’t know anything to comment.
I don’t have specific models in mind.
For my more recent Pocketbook purchase, I wanted something closer to 6-7 inches, 10 is too much and I wanted to have physical buttons to turn pages and not just a touch screen. The button requirement limited my choices heavily. Looking back in hindsight I don’t use these buttons, I don’t need them, but my first device had no touchscreen so… :).
I didn’t like the position of these buttons on the Kobo Libra 2 or whatever (and maybe it was also too big?), and those were pretty much my concerns.
My model of the Pocketbook was already an “old” model when I got it. My only concern mildly related to piracy was: Does it support epub? But that’s not a restriction - you can read other formats.
Thanks for the encouragement!
Mistborn: The Final Empire, by Brandon Sanderson. An epic fantasy.
I loved it and just started the second book.
Oh doh, my bad :) Thanks again!