Best e-reader for Cyrillic text?

[gwynevans]

Originally Posted by larisa0001

Hmm, thanks! The Sony Reader is a lot cheaper than the other ones, at least on ebay, so I am highly tempted by that option. And is it easy to convert PDF files to whatever format it uses? Or does it read regular PDF files?

Regular PDF files, but (like other devices,) for best results they should be generated with the page size of the screen/device in mind, rather than an A4/Letter piece of paper.

There are options available for Russian fonts on the Sony - e.g. it's got Unicode support in the software, but for some reason the default fonts don't go up that far but it's not hard to reflash the firmware to add the 'missing' characters & that's what many people do. See http://www.the-ebook.org/rus/?page_id=85 for more info.

[orwell2k]

Consider the BeBook also.

Allows user fonts to be loaded on the SD card in a fonts/ folder, so you can load various cyrillic fonts to choose from.

Also the language settings allow you to set the device to Russian, so all menus/commands/screens are in Russian.

And the BeBook supports FB2 which is popular for Russian eBooks, as well as a multitude of other formats (Mobi, Lit, Txt, Doc, HTML/CHM, PDF, etc.).

If you have some docs you'd like tested on the BeBook, upload them and I can display them on my device and take some pics if you want to check out the Russian text.

Cheers.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by orwell2k

Consider the BeBook also.

Allows user fonts to be loaded on the SD card in a fonts/ folder, so you can load various cyrillic fonts to choose from.

Last I heard, you couldn't select user-installed fonts for Mobi books on the BeBeek. Has that changed now?

[orwell2k]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Last I heard, you couldn't select user-installed fonts for Mobi books on the BeBeek. Has that changed now?

No, you're quite right - Mobi still cannot select user-installed fonts, so you're stuck with the 3 system-defined fonts. I don't know if this will impact any Russian language Mobi docs, as I don't have any. If somebody wants to upload one in this thread I can give it a try and see if the BeBook handles it.

BTW Harry, is BeBeek an affectionate term that has developed on this forum, or just a typo?

Cheers.

[HarryT]

Just a typo .

[larisa0001]

Originally Posted by orwell2k

Consider the BeBook also.

Allows user fonts to be loaded on the SD card in a fonts/ folder, so you can load various cyrillic fonts to choose from.

Also the language settings allow you to set the device to Russian, so all menus/commands/screens are in Russian.

And the BeBook supports FB2 which is popular for Russian eBooks, as well as a multitude of other formats (Mobi, Lit, Txt, Doc, HTML/CHM, PDF, etc.).

If you have some docs you'd like tested on the BeBook, upload them and I can display them on my device and take some pics if you want to check out the Russian text.

Cheers.

Hmm, thanks! I have been eyeing the BeBook with a great deal of interest (especially since it's on sale at the moment); and since you are so kind, could you try a random file from www.lib.ru on it? Doesn't matter which one - for instance, this one would be fine:

http://www.lib.ru/BULGAKOW/master.txt

Also, how stiff are the buttons on it? Do they require a lot of force to press, or are they fairly normal?

LM

[larisa0001]

Originally Posted by gwynevans

Regular PDF files, but (like other devices,) for best results they should be generated with the page size of the screen/device in mind, rather than an A4/Letter piece of paper.

There are options available for Russian fonts on the Sony - e.g. it's got Unicode support in the software, but for some reason the default fonts don't go up that far but it's not hard to reflash the firmware to add the 'missing' characters & that's what many people do. See http://www.the-ebook.org/rus/?page_id=85 for more info.

Eep. Just read through all of that, and I'm scared. I might buy a Reader that's already had all of that done. Generally, my attempts to modify the software on my gadgets tend to end badly.

[torbich]

Originally Posted by larisa0001

Hmm, thanks! I have been eyeing the BeBook with a great deal of interest (especially since it's on sale at the moment); and since you are so kind, could you try a random file from www.lib.ru on it? Doesn't matter which one - for instance, this one would be fine:

Welcome to russian-speaking ebook forum:
http://www.the-ebook.org/forum/
You can read lots of information about LBook, the analogue of BeBook, on this forum. Several reviews:
http://www.the-ebook.org/rus/?p=793 , http://www.the-ebook.org/rus/?p=137 .

Moreover, the LBook firmware can be easily flashed to BeBook, and it is fully compatible either with lib.ru books or with aldebaran.ru books.

Sony is a great device too (live photos: http://www.smotri.te.ua/rub_11458), but you have to flash it with russian fonts and have to convert books for it.

[larisa0001]

Cool, thanks! I'll check it out.

[orwell2k]

Originally Posted by larisa0001

Hmm, thanks! I have been eyeing the BeBook with a great deal of interest (especially since it's on sale at the moment); and since you are so kind, could you try a random file from www.lib.ru on it? Doesn't matter which one - for instance, this one would be fine:

http://www.lib.ru/BULGAKOW/master.txt

Also, how stiff are the buttons on it? Do they require a lot of force to press, or are they fairly normal?

LM

Last question answered first

The buttons are not stiff at all (IMHO). They obviously loosen a little over time and use, especially the page forward button as it gets most use, but I found all the buttons quite nice to use. Some people don't like the inset "Cancel/Return" key as part of the large round "Menu/OK" button on the lower right front, but I find it pretty good. There are two page turn button locations, so lefties and righties should also be happy. I also like the matte black finish as it makes the device very "grippy" and easy to hold out of the cover, which is much lighter and comfortable for home use, reading in bed, etc.

Now onto the main issue - Cyrillic fonts. Short answer is not problem. You don't need to get carried away and do any special font install, configurations, etc. like the Sony. It's almost plug-and-play (or is it plug-and-pray?), with a few caveats detailed below. So that makes the BeBook worth considering. But nothing is ever that simple, so...

Now onto the detailed answer:

Hey BTW, great choice of book. I've only read Bulgakov's Master and Margarita in English as my Russian is way too basic, but it's a cool book. And I love the lib.ru pages because they have so many etexts available for free, and many of them are also translated into English!

Anyway, I downloaded a few versions of the book and played around with them on my device. Basically, there are no problems displaying Russian fonts on the BeBook. There are a few tricks to understand depending on the file format being used, and I'll try to explain:

(1) Obviously files from Lib.ru are downloaded either as HTML or TXT. You have to be careful that these files are saved in Cyrillic (Windows) encoding - other Cyrillic formats and UTF will not display the Russian characters correctly. I'm guessing that actually what you have to do is save the page in the appropriate Cyrillic encoding, it's just the pages I used were encoded in Cyrillic (Windows). I downloaded 2 HTML formats (Fine HTML and Lib.ru HTML) - both are OK, just the layout varies a little. I also downloaded 1 text version (the difference is that the HTML pages have a few pictures, the text does not).

(2) I then converted the Fine HTML version to FB2 using BookDesigner 4 - it worked great, including all the images. Although BookDesigner did have a problem opening the HTML file directly (it lost a couple of paras in the middle of the book for some reason) , so I ended up opening the file in a browser, then doing "Select-All > Copy" and opening a new eBook in BookDesigner and pasting the copied text in - this inserted all text, headings and images as well - very cool!

(3) I also converted the HTML file to Mobi using the MobiTools Perl script html2mobi.exe. I tried mobigen.exe, another DOS command line tool, but didn't like the format. The html2mobi.exe script allows you to specify title, author, book cover image, etc. (mobigen doesn't seem to be able to do this), which is nice for displaying the info on the BeBook bookshelf.

Having done these conversions, I loaded the following file formats onto my BeBook: FB2, Mobi, HTML, TXT. I then noticed the following:

(A) Russian character book names displayed correctly except the HTML files, which only displayed the Russian characters in the bookshelf name when I selected Russian language from the BeBook settings menu (i.e. all menus now in Russian!). Bizarrely, the folders containing images for the HTML pages always displayed the correct Russian characters on the bookshelf, so I'm guessing the HTML file is taking the bookshelf name from within the file, rather than the file name. The reason this is important is that you need to set the BeBook Language to Russian to read the actual Russian characters inside TXT or HTML files (even though the text files displayed the names in Russian when set to English). Not a big problem, but you just have to remember.

(B) FB2 and Mobi always display Russian characters just fine on the bookshelf and when opened for reading - it doesn't matter about the actual BeBook Language setting. Although I haven't figured out yet how to generate a Mobi eBook using Russian characters in the book title/author, as I'm just using DOS command line tools for the creation - anyone have any ideas?

(Note: The BeBook uses the filename for name sorting on the bookshelf, but displays the "Title" and "Author" tag information for many formats, including FB2, Mobi and HTML - this means if I have a series collection of eBooks, I usually add a prefix in the filename with the series name and book number, ensuring when I do a name sort on the bookshelf my books will appear in series order, regardless of the actual book title displayed - I like it, but some people may find this annoying until they figure it out.).

Summary:

BeBook handles the display of Russian book names and text with little or no additional configuration of the device - you don't need to install additional fonts, and the most you really have to do is set the language option to Russian (and make sure your source TXT or HTML files are saved with the correct character encoding). Great news for Russkie-readers!

One thing to note is that the hyphenation is probably a little screwy in FB2 - this also happens in English, but it seems to have improved. I'm not sure how good it is in Russian. But this was also always a problem on my old Acer n10 PocketPC with Haali Reader - you just have to get used to it. Mobi may performs better in this regard.

Attached are a couple of pics showing the BeBook display. Unfortunately I only had a small desk lamp for illumination, so the lighting is not great, but you can clearly see the font display. The Pics are as follows:

IMG_1341_en.jpg - Bookshelf with BeBook Language set to English

IMG_1342_ru.jpg - Bookshelf with BeBook Language set to Russian (note the HTML filenames now display correctly)

IMG_1344_mobi.jpg - Mobi version created using html2mobi.exe (CLI Perl script from MobiTools)

IMG_1345_html.jpg - HTML version downloaded from Lib.ru

IMG_1346_fb2.jpg - FB2 version created from the Lib.ru HTML using BookDesigner 4

Hope this helps.

[bainkel]

Originally Posted by Kris777

You can see the attached picture of my jetBook with Hebrew text on it

Hi. What format is that hebrew on the Jetbook? Will it display hebrew in epub format? Is there an option for "entering hebrew text" on this Jetbook? Thank you!

[HarryT]

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