3 ms·
Something that's always bothered me about Kindles is the web browser. Like, I get it, that's not what it's made for. But it should be able to do more than it is
by Yawrehto 2y ago
Something that's always bothered me about Kindles is the web browser. Like, I get it, that's not what it's made for. But it should be able to do more than it is currently able to. I don't mean "easily rendering complex websites". The kindle is made for text display, its current displays are surprisingly broad (although still narrow enough that if I'm using the web browser I typically go through stuff I know works - Wikipedia, Google, etc - or things on textonly.website and other such things with an emphasis on being small). But what really nags me is the formats of books it lets you download. Here they are: .prc, .txt, .mobi, .azw3.
They are, needless to say, not the most common formats. A search on google for "computing filetype:[X]", with "[X]" being replaced by pdf, epub, mobi, txt, and azw3 (prc produced seemingly no relevant results) has about 174 results for Kindle-supported files (done by going to the last page as Google's counter is more accurate there), 120 of which were .txt. The non-Kindle supported searches, epub and pdf, had 356 results, 67 of which were epub files. But Google's engine doesn't do great for finding books. A much better database is LibGen. As I couldn't figure out an analysis of all LibGen files, I searched for "Astronomy" (unless noted all LibGen searches are in nonfiction) which yielded 2,550 results, sorted by extension, and counted.
Results:
4 things in .zip format, 0.15 percent
3 in .rar, 0.11 percent
2144 in .pdf, 84 percent
11 in mobi, 0.43 percent
1 in mdf, lit, gz and bz2, 0.039 percent each
214 in epub, 8.39 percent.
156 in djvu, 6.1 percent
3 in azw3, 0.11 percent
8 in 7z, 0.31 percent
2 in chm, 0.078 percent.
In my experience that's rather skewed (I'd never seen a 7z one before, or at least not noticed one). But the general idea - PDF most common, then EPUB, then something else (often MOBI, distantly) - remains. The fact that Kindle can't go from 14 downloadable things to 228 (actually, many legal open access ebooks are published in just pdf or pdf+epub, it's rare to get mobi or azw3) by letting you download an already existent format it kind of supports is a bit ridiculous and has always struck me as odd.
But I am very curious how the color kindle works on the web browser, as noncolor Kindles have the background bleed a bit if you scroll. I imagine you'd end up with this sludgy mess of a background, but I'm not sure.