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This is the reason I love ebooks on a proper workstation with a huge monitor. I can fit eight or more books open at once... but more likely 3 or 4 plus a web-br
by atchoo 4y ago
This is the reason I love ebooks on a proper workstation with a huge monitor. I can fit eight or more books open at once... but more likely 3 or 4 plus a web-browser and notes.
I might have three copies of the same book open at once. One for linear reading, one for search and one for cross referencing. Much better than a physical book. A bookmarks side-bar works well in e-readers if there are specific locations you regularly need access to.
Tablets and physical e-readers suck in comparison to a proper computer. You also might need to strip DRM to get out of some walled-garden reader that prevents you opening multiple instances of the same book. Copy paste is a killer feature for note taking (and another reason to ditch ecosystem readers that interfere with copy paste like Apple books).
- darkteflon 4y agoI like this a lot - particularly as there may be a range of reasons that you can’t get hold of a particular book in physical form. I’ve never used or looked into non-ecosystem e-readers. Do you have any recommendations?
- atchoo 4y agoI use the Calibre e-reader with custom style overrides to get my preferred spacing, margins etc. It's ugly out of the box but doesn't require much tweaking to look like Apple Books if you know css. Works great on MacOs/Linux/Windows (I use them all). If a book has hardcoded fonts/styles/spacing I don't like then I use the Calibre editor to remove them. I don't use Calibre as a library tool, I find that pretty annoying. I just use a git repo with folders for genres and markdown file with each book for notes. On Android I use ReadEra.
- granneman 4y agoWhat are your overrides? Thanks!
- atchoo 4y agoI use a window a bit bigger than a typical fiction paperback and a bit wider aspect ratio. I like a good bit of whitespace in the margin to help me concentrate. I don't want the text to feel crampt or my reading scanline to enter another window. After making the changes I zoom in (ctrl-mousewheel) until the text is roughly 20pt on a 34" screen (depends on the screen). The viewer might need to be restarted to sort out the layout changes. This is what I have in my notes for the settings. Just a result of iterative poking until I like it so the css is uh... not fit for a code review :) # Font Baskerville (google fonts) I think I might use Merriweather on some OS because they render differently, I can't recall offhand). # Colours custom scheme: foreground: #2f2f2f background: #fcfcfc # Page Layout > Padding 100, 100 75, 75 # Misc - remember window last position # Headers and footers - progress bottom right # Style > css p { line-height: 1.5em !important; font-size: 0.854em !important; padding-bottom: 25px; text-indent: 35.868px !important; } div { line-height:1.5em; padding-top: 1em; } line-height: 1.5em;
- darkteflon 4y agoCheers - this works great. I’ll have to stick to using Calibre for library management, unfortunately, as I run a Kindle too.