Amazon Kindle

blue.peter

Sterlingtimes said:

Thank you, blue.peter, for your great help

You're very welcome. I'm glad that my comments have been of some use.

Sterlingtimes said:

I appreciate that I may lose the books that I have read but they can remain on the DX. Nothing will make me read Dante's Divine Comedy for a second time (-:

I can well understand not wanting to read that particular book again, but I'd hazard a guess that that's not the only e-book that you've bought from Amazon. If you want to know how to convert Amazon e-books to EPUB and load them onto a Kobo device, you're welcome to DM me. You'll need a Windows or MacOS computer, but won't need to spend money on the necessary software.

Sterlingtimes

Thank you, blue.peter, for your kind offer of support. I will be an official OAP in a couple of months so it is less likely that I will return to books that I have previously read. However, it may be that I need to convert a book. I will let you know. The Kobo, incidentally, was priced at about £40 less buying through Rakuten directly. 

blue.peter

Sterlingtimes said:

Thank you, blue.peter, for your kind offer of support. I will be an official OAP in a couple of months so it is less likely that I will return to books that I have previously read. However, it may be that I need to convert a book. I will let you know.

That's fine. I've already got some notes written about the software installation (one part of it is slightly fiddly). They were written for someone else, but it'd be no trouble to make them available to you.

I can understand not returning to books that you've already read. I've got quite a few that I keep meaning to reread, but never reach because my TBR list is so long. My big mistake was joining a Facebook book group. You wouldn't believe how many interesting-looking books I see there. I took early retirement six years or so ago, and my TBR list (a spreadsheet, in fact) is far longer now than it was then.

Sterlingtimes said:

The Kobo, incidentally, was priced at about £40 less buying through Rakuten directly. 

That's good news! I do hope that you're happy with it when it arrives. By the way, you'll find that the user interface is, unsurprisingly, slightly different from the Kindle's. It's still perfectly usable, though. It'll just take a short while for you to get used to it.

Sterlingtimes

With 45 years of work and 12 years of study alongside that, I have had limited opportunities to get into fiction. I am now working my way through classic literature. The dictionary function on the Kindle DX has been very helpful. I do hope that Kobo offers a similar dictionary.

blue.peter

Sterlingtimes said:

I do hope that Kobo offers a similar dictionary.

It does. And the functionality is as for Kindle's: hold your finger on a word, and the definition appears in a new window:

Incidentally, Kobo offers a feature that Kindle doesn't, and which you might find useful. You can save web articles to Pocket and read them later on your e-reader.

blue.peter

PS - if you want to learn anything more about your new e-reader before it arrives, I've put a PDF copy of the manual in my Dropbox. You can download it from here.

whizzywoo

I see you've already been advised about Kobo ereaders and have actually bought one now.

I have used Kobo ereaders for the past 7 or 8 years and I absolutely love them.  It also means I don't have to buy ebooks from Amazon!  A big plus in my opinion.  

Sterlingtimes

whizzywoo said:

I see you've already been advised about Kobo ereaders and have actually bought one now.

I have used Kobo ereaders for the past 7 or 8 years and I absolutely love them.  It also means I don't have to buy ebooks from Amazon!  A big plus in my opinion.  

Thank you, this is encouraging. My annual book expenditure is relatively small since I mainly read classics that are out of copyright. I sometimes pay a little extra to buy a good translation of a foreign book. I will now have to have a look at the Kobo book site.

Sterlingtimes

blue.peter said:

PS - if you want to learn anything more about your new e-reader before it arrives, I've put a PDF copy of the manual in my Dropbox. You can download it from here.

Again. Most helpful and nicely sized for my eyes. I do like to have the text jagged to the right since this eases readability.

blue.peter

Sterlingtimes said:

I do like to have the text jagged to the right since this eases readability.

Then I'm sure that you'll have been pleased to see pp 41-42 of the User Guide. You get a choice of justification options for books on the Kobo. Ragged right is available.

You're not the first person I've heard say that they find ragged right easier to read. Whilst that's how I have it set, it's only marginal for me: I don't find the difference between that and full justification significant. I suspect that this is because I use a comparatively small font size*, and it becomes more noticeable at the larger size that you prefer.

*3 (out of 14) on my Kindles.