MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Story HD and Google Books scanned free books

wilsonch · 07-29-2011, 03:04 PM

This is a narrow, personal review of part of the feature set of the Story HD. I bought the Story HD to supplement my other ereaders for particular activities that most people don't care about -- academic reading, especially of free ebooks from Google Books. Let's take as an example Service Book of the Holy Catholic-Orthodox Apostolic Church. This book has pages which make sense only in the image (two parallel texts side by side, or little set-aside boxes of text) but which one would like to be able to search.

The old free ebooks on Google Books were scanned by robots (yielding a PDF) and usually OCR'd (yielding an epub). So if one is reading on line one can usually gracefully switch between the searchable text (epub) and image of the original page (PDF). The Google Books application on my Android does this also. The OCR'd texts are of varying quality. Some of them are filled with errors, but one can still search and reflow them.

(In other environments one has PDF files that are built from text and are not scanned images. They of course are searchable and can even be reflowed.)

The sought-for nirvana is to be able to highlight and annotate them in this dual-view environment. There are many highlighters for regular text, and a few for PDF images. Google provides neither.

So my interest in the Story HD came from the higher-resolution screen and direct linkage to Google Books. Email from iriver support told me ahead of time that they did not have the dual-mode feature.

In my little world (of ereaders I own), and for these purposes, the competing device is not the Kindle 3 but the Kindle 2 DX. People who wish to tell me that it's not a fair or useful comparison, or that I could have had a Kindle 3 DX for the money I have spent on various ereaders, are welcome to do so. I will ignore them but perhaps they will feel better having said those things.

How did it all work out? Not very well, but the primary issues are in software and not hardware, so one may hope for improvement.

First of all, the display matched my expectations. It is crisper. Compared to the Kindle 2 DX it is much, much faster on full-page images of scanned PDFs. The Kindle's legibility is equal to or greater than the the Story HD's, but of course it is much larger (and hence less convenient for carrying around, reading while walking, etc.).

The integration with Google Books does the basics. I did not use it to search Google Books, only to access books I had already put into my library on line. (To search I use Google Books on line, or GooReader (a Windows PC application). I do not expect an ereader to be able to search the free Google Books effectively.) I did buy one current commercial book via the Story HD. Things worked as they should.

For my particular, narrow purposes the direct interface for the free books did not work out gracefully. The Story HD does not allow the user to specify which of the two forms to download (PDF or epub) -- it brings down the epub (or the PDF if there exists no epub). This makes a kind of basic sense, but it means that to get the PDF onto the Story HD I am as usual downloading the file to my PC and then copying it over via the USB cable. So I don't benefit from the Google Books integration for that purpose.

Furthermore, unlike the Google Books reader app, the Story HD does not reflow the epub text. Therefore one can end up with ghastly line and page breaks that were in the original source (before it was OCR'd). I emphasize that this matters only for old, free, OCR'd epubs, not for commercial ones that regular people would buy and read.

"But wait!" you will say. "There is a reflow menu choice!" Very true. But it is greyed out in epubs and is enabled only in textual PDF files. Again, this makes a kind of basic sense for the general reader, but not in the narrow context I am talking about, in which there are no textual PDF files.

The titles of books I read are sometimes much longer than those of regular commercial books. Instead of, say, Black Hawk Down, I might see Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Volume 10. The thing I need to see is the very end of the title, which volume it is. The titles list on the Story HD shows only the beginning of the title, and one can't (for instance) go to landscape mode to widen things. If one moves the cursor to the book title on the Kindle, after a second the full title is shown.

Now, some details to cover:

1. A very nice feature for folks like me is that in the epub files the Story HD displays the original page number, in very tiny type. It is very awkward to footnote from a regular flowed-text ebook. (Kindle has now standardized its "position" number across devices so that it can be used in footnotes.) You may now say, "But reflowing epub text, which you just asked for, messes up original pagination!" True. It would require marking in the reflowed line where the page boundary was. I'm sure people who can put tiny numbers in the margin can put a tiny mark in the text.

2. I was very pleased to see the graceful way that the Story HD handled books that aren't in English. I bought my Story HD at Target in Middle America. (I did not try any right-to-left languages.) There are two tasks involved. One is to display the text of a book. Many ebooks contain the needed fonts so that they display correctly on most any ereader; those that don't contain the fonts don't (except perhaps on a "native" machine for that language, which has all the fonts built in). The Story HD behaves the same as other ereaders. The second task is to display the book titles in the list of books. Many ereaders fail here, showing little boxes or question marks with occasional numbers. The Russian translation of 1984 does not have its title munged.

The Story HD shows the titles of Russian-language books in Russian, and displays all the special French characters in the titles of French books. For people like me this is a Good Thing.

Summary: I found the Story HD's display of image-heavy books to be clear and fast. The basic support for Google Books that almost all readers will want is there. The specialized support I had unrealistically hoped for wasn't there, but it can conceivably be firmwared in.

07-29-2011, 03:04 PM	#1
wilsonch Enthusiast Posts: 31 Karma: 74 Join Date: Dec 2009 Location: Chicago USA Device: Various Androids; Kindle Touch; Nook GlowLight Plus 7.8	Story HD and Google Books scanned free books This is a narrow, personal review of part of the feature set of the Story HD. I bought the Story HD to supplement my other ereaders for particular activities that most people don't care about -- academic reading, especially of free ebooks from Google Books. Let's take as an example Service Book of the Holy Catholic-Orthodox Apostolic Church. This book has pages which make sense only in the image (two parallel texts side by side, or little set-aside boxes of text) but which one would like to be able to search. The old free ebooks on Google Books were scanned by robots (yielding a PDF) and usually OCR'd (yielding an epub). So if one is reading on line one can usually gracefully switch between the searchable text (epub) and image of the original page (PDF). The Google Books application on my Android does this also. The OCR'd texts are of varying quality. Some of them are filled with errors, but one can still search and reflow them. (In other environments one has PDF files that are built from text and are not scanned images. They of course are searchable and can even be reflowed.) The sought-for nirvana is to be able to highlight and annotate them in this dual-view environment. There are many highlighters for regular text, and a few for PDF images. Google provides neither. So my interest in the Story HD came from the higher-resolution screen and direct linkage to Google Books. Email from iriver support told me ahead of time that they did not have the dual-mode feature. In my little world (of ereaders I own), and for these purposes, the competing device is not the Kindle 3 but the Kindle 2 DX. People who wish to tell me that it's not a fair or useful comparison, or that I could have had a Kindle 3 DX for the money I have spent on various ereaders, are welcome to do so. I will ignore them but perhaps they will feel better having said those things. How did it all work out? Not very well, but the primary issues are in software and not hardware, so one may hope for improvement. First of all, the display matched my expectations. It is crisper. Compared to the Kindle 2 DX it is much, much faster on full-page images of scanned PDFs. The Kindle's legibility is equal to or greater than the the Story HD's, but of course it is much larger (and hence less convenient for carrying around, reading while walking, etc.). The integration with Google Books does the basics. I did not use it to search Google Books, only to access books I had already put into my library on line. (To search I use Google Books on line, or GooReader (a Windows PC application). I do not expect an ereader to be able to search the free Google Books effectively.) I did buy one current commercial book via the Story HD. Things worked as they should. For my particular, narrow purposes the direct interface for the free books did not work out gracefully. The Story HD does not allow the user to specify which of the two forms to download (PDF or epub) -- it brings down the epub (or the PDF if there exists no epub). This makes a kind of basic sense, but it means that to get the PDF onto the Story HD I am as usual downloading the file to my PC and then copying it over via the USB cable. So I don't benefit from the Google Books integration for that purpose. Furthermore, unlike the Google Books reader app, the Story HD does not reflow the epub text. Therefore one can end up with ghastly line and page breaks that were in the original source (before it was OCR'd). I emphasize that this matters only for old, free, OCR'd epubs, not for commercial ones that regular people would buy and read. "But wait!" you will say. "There is a reflow menu choice!" Very true. But it is greyed out in epubs and is enabled only in textual PDF files. Again, this makes a kind of basic sense for the general reader, but not in the narrow context I am talking about, in which there are no textual PDF files. The titles of books I read are sometimes much longer than those of regular commercial books. Instead of, say, Black Hawk Down, I might see Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Volume 10. The thing I need to see is the very end of the title, which volume it is. The titles list on the Story HD shows only the beginning of the title, and one can't (for instance) go to landscape mode to widen things. If one moves the cursor to the book title on the Kindle, after a second the full title is shown. Now, some details to cover: 1. A very nice feature for folks like me is that in the epub files the Story HD displays the original page number, in very tiny type. It is very awkward to footnote from a regular flowed-text ebook. (Kindle has now standardized its "position" number across devices so that it can be used in footnotes.) You may now say, "But reflowing epub text, which you just asked for, messes up original pagination!" True. It would require marking in the reflowed line where the page boundary was. I'm sure people who can put tiny numbers in the margin can put a tiny mark in the text. 2. I was very pleased to see the graceful way that the Story HD handled books that aren't in English. I bought my Story HD at Target in Middle America. (I did not try any right-to-left languages.) There are two tasks involved. One is to display the text of a book. Many ebooks contain the needed fonts so that they display correctly on most any ereader; those that don't contain the fonts don't (except perhaps on a "native" machine for that language, which has all the fonts built in). The Story HD behaves the same as other ereaders. The second task is to display the book titles in the list of books. Many ereaders fail here, showing little boxes or question marks with occasional numbers. The Russian translation of 1984 does not have its title munged. The Story HD shows the titles of Russian-language books in Russian, and displays all the special French characters in the titles of French books. For people like me this is a Good Thing. Summary: I found the Story HD's display of image-heavy books to be clear and fast. The basic support for Google Books that almost all readers will want is there. The specialized support I had unrealistically hoped for wasn't there, but it can conceivably be firmwared in.