Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
Is that about it in general, or simply due to justified text? Are there other problems that make you want to nuke it? Or did you like it, BUT for the justified text?
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(Sorry for the long-winded response.)
A big part of is that I really think that running Android on a 16 levels of grayscale eink device is a big mistake. As far as I know Android doesn't have any awareness of whether or not the display is grayscale and it may not have any awareness of how many different colors/gray levels it can display and assumes that it's at least 256 colors. The reason this is a problem is that the apps all assume it's a color display and the colors of their buttons, icons, user interface stuff is designed for that, but can fail horribly on the 16 grays eink device. Case in point, the Boox didn't come with the google apps installed; I think they have to pay google licensing fees in order to do that. So they have some relatively painless way of installing the google apps, which I did. I wanted the google play store so I could install an alternative epub reader. After you install the play store you have to do some minimal song and dance to make it work, maybe sign in with your google account. But that's when the grayscale problem hit me because google was using colors that mapped to nearly identical grayscale values for some message and I couldn't see it and assumed it was hung. I reset it several times but eventually tried turning up the brightness a lot and that allowed me to see the message and proceed. Then that introduced me to the wonderful world of horrible epub readers on android, the ones that think they're clever and use some faux paper background on all pages, or used impossible colors for eink. I could have avoided all that pain and anguish and just installed koreader, which the boox has a direct download for; it does a great job. But by that time I was so disgusted it went into a drawer and I've never taken it out again. I really think that I should be able to buy an ereader and use it out of the box without it requiring me to install some additional software just for basic functionality. And overall it had a sort of cheesy half-baked feel to it. You can sort of see that in the boox forum here where boox keeps claiming that they'll fix things or update android but it's all hot air.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
--presumably, you grew up and went to school in a day and age before computers? I mean, many if not most MRers seem to be that age. What did you do about paper books? Textbooks, novels, etc.?
Hitch
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Yes, 67 here. I think it's because printed books are done at a high enough resolution and/or use software that can handle fully justified text well without those ugly big spaces between words, the ones that jump out at me on an eink device. My stupid Kobo doesn't hyphenate when it's ragged right and I do notice when a big word is pushed to the next line and leaves a big space at the end of the line above but it's only a momentary thing. It's rare that I've seen a printed book where the spacing is wonky.