Kobo Discounts: Coupon Codes + Discussion

[pdurrant]

50% off select titles: AUG50

UK Link

[samosa]

Originally Posted by ekbell

The old library https://www.kobobooks.com/library/library.html (if it takes you to a login page login and try the link again) clearly shows the download options for each book (the trash/archive section also shows the available formats).

thank you v much had no idea such a link still exists!!

Discovered that I will lose online access to these books:

bring back the bureaucrats

Growing Public v1 By Lindert, Peter H. (cambridge)

Collective Choice and social Welfare by Amartya Sen

Modeling Bounded Rationality By Ariel Rubinstein

Liberalism and the Limits of Justice by michael sandel (cambridge)

Regression Analysis of Count Data By Cameron, A. Colin (cambridge)

The Mathematics of Financial Derivatives By Wilmott (cambridge)

Understanding the Process of Economic Change By North, Douglass C. (cambridge)

Violence and Social Orders By North, Douglass C. (Cambridge)

In the Shadow of Violencey By North, Douglass C. (Cambridge)

Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity… By Brown, Peter (Princeton U)

Global Crossings: Immigration, Civilization, and America By Vargas Llosa, Alvaro

Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet By Jackson, Tim (Routledge)

The Great Walk of China: Travels on Foot from Shanghai to Tibet By Earnshaw, Graham

Explaining Long-Term Trends in Health and Longevity By Fogel, Robert W. (cambridge)


Edited. The irony of it. Many of these books I deliberately bought the PDF because they contain a good amount of equations and graphics and would look really bad (unreadable) in a mobi / epub format. So many are published by Cambridge University Press, sigh...

[ferrywoman]

Books with no download links can still be downloaded via the Kobo (PC) app, after which our friend Alf can take care of things for you.

It's a hassle especially when you've got a few hundred books in your library, Edited.

[lkmiller]

I know they're going to stop providing pdfs soon, but you can't download them from the website now? I only had one and got an error trying to download it. I thought it might just be an issue with that particular book. I realized I already had it backed up though. Haven't checked whether I could download it with Kobo Desktop yet.

ETA: Grab them one way or the other while you still can. Then as ferrywoman said, visit Apprentice Alf.

[Hemmi]

Anyone interested in becoming a VIP for $5? I have two codes:

VIPRSTKEMT
VIPREA5E7A

Both expire Aug 21st.

[beautifulsoup]

GRT50BOOKS just worked for me in the US.

[peachiekene]

Originally Posted by Hemmi

Anyone interested in becoming a VIP for $5? I have two codes:

VIPRSTKEMT
VIPREA5E7A

Both expire Aug 21st.

Grabbed one, thanks.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by Hemmi

Anyone interested in becoming a VIP for $5? I have two codes:

VIPRSTKEMT
VIPREA5E7A

Both expire Aug 21st.

Used the other one to renew for this year, thanks!

ETA: Ooh, they even had a book that was on my wishlist as one of the VIP freebie redemption selections.

[booklover6]

Originally Posted by beautifulsoup

GRT50BOOKS just worked for me in the US.

Oh, thank you! I was just going to buy a book and saw this, and it worked!

[peachiekene]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Ooh, they even had a book that was on my wishlist as one of the VIP freebie redemption selections.

I'm debating between 3 titles. 2 cozies and 1 true crime.

[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by peachiekene

I'm debating between 3 titles. 2 cozies and 1 true crime.

True crime is everywhere. Go with a cozy! (Put it up to a poll??? You know we would help out. We are nothing if not an opinionated lot!)

[peachiekene]

Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks

True crime is everywhere. Go with a cozy! (Put it up to a poll??? You know we would help out. We are nothing if not an opinionated lot!)

I'm assuming in the Reading Recommendation section?

Hopefully, if I go to all the trouble, the coupon will work! Last time I was a VIP member I had to contact customer service to get a new code.

[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by peachiekene

I'm assuming in the Reading Recommendation section?

Hopefully, if I go to all the trouble, the coupon will work! Last time I was a VIP member I had to contact customer service to get a new code.

Well, now, that's putting a bit of pressure on things, isn't it??? I shall keep an eye out for your poll should you decide to do one!

[datcha]

Originally Posted by samosa

thank you v much had no idea such a link still exists!!

Edited. The irony of it. Many of these books I deliberately bought the PDF because they contain a good amount of equations and graphics and would look really bad (unreadable) in a mobi / epub format. So many are published by Cambridge University Press, sigh...

MY experience with my Kobo ereader (a GLO HD, but I suspect it is true of other models) is that math does not look bad in epub: it does not look at all.
I bought a physics book in epub from Kobo about 18 months ago, and I had to return it because formulae and diagrams were so tiny that I could not read them, even with a magnifier. Kobo was nice about it, and gave me a valuable coupon. But I'd rather be able to read the book on my ereader.
I do not know whether that has improved.

[salamanderjuice]

Originally Posted by datcha

MY experience with my Kobo ereader (a GLO HD, but I suspect it is true of other models) is that math does not look bad in epub: it does not look at all.
I bought a physics book in epub from Kobo about 18 months ago, and I had to return it because formulae and diagrams were so tiny that I could not read them, even with a magnifier. Kobo was nice about it, and gave me a valuable coupon. But I'd rather be able to read the book on my ereader.
I do not know whether that has improved.

Sigh. It's entirely the publisher's fault and maybe even Amazon's fault(Yes, really Amazon).

Epub 3 added support for MathML, which allows typesetting of math in HTML. Kobo supports this on eInk devices. It allows stuff like resizing of equations and the like.

But a lot of publishers are lazy and instead of retyping their math epubs to use MathML they will at best put in SVG images and sometimes even .pngs or .jpgs of equations. These images are often stupidly given absolute pixel sizing which results on them being nigh unreadable on high resolution devices because they are designed for 800x600 screens and not double that.

Amazon comes in because .AZW3 doesn't support MathML(I'm not sure if KFX has something similar but they haven't crowed about it at all). And since Amazon is the largest ebook store and they don't support it I can't imagine publishers are particularly inspired to implement it. It doesn't help that there's still some crummy readers that can't handle ePub3 anyways so I doubt someone like Springer wants to spend the dough on just a Kobo edition.

With the right programming they could even include SVG or even jpg images as a fallback for readers that don't support MathML but they don't bother even though these eBooks typically cost hundreds of dollars. I certainly won't be paying hundreds, often more than the paper version for something so shoddy and lazy.

If you want a good example of a MathML supported epub the "On Optimal Bit Allocation for Classification-Based Source-Dependent Transform Coding" sample epub located here is a good example.

Hopefully someone will write a good LaTeX to epub3 engine so the publishers can have zero excuse but I bet they will continue to muck it up anyways.