In which I try to do stuff with technology - historically, this doesn't go well for me

[laceblade]

I received a Kobo Touch e-reader! It's pretty great.

My mission is to get really comfortable with it & upload lots of content on to it before I have surgery on January 18th. After my surgery, I won't be able to lift things that weigh more than 2 lbs, or bend over. Reading will be easier on this small/cute device, and possible wherever - a coffee shop, bedridden, the bus, etc.

Things I can do:
--Download fanfiction from the Archive of Our Own (easy b/c they have a button!), put it in Calibre, get it on my e-reader
--Buy books through Kobo's weird website/management system
--Make huge fanfics into .epub or .mobi files by using squee!Book....sort of (see below).

Things I'd like to do: (advice welcome)
--be able to add a cover image to fics I download from the AO3. I have....a lot of fanart saved to my hard drive, haha.
--Get rid of the ads that play when it's in sleep mode. Find out if I can hack it and put my own pictures on there instead.
--Play with squee!Book more. At the moment - I can't embed images inside a chapter. I've tried making an e-book for Lullabye for the New World Order twice now. The first time, I hadn't yet figured out how to insert an image into the title. The second time, it worked! But the text file of the fic itself was totally, utterly borked. Like, there was a single paragraph.....various chapter title pages, but no fic. V. disappointing, and I'm not sure what I did wrong.
--I'm semi-dreading using squee!Book for some of the really old FF7 fic I used to read and would like to reread to see how it holds up....some was posted on sites built using frames. Since the Word Processor on my computer crashes every time I copy/paste text into it, this could prove to be very frustrating.
--Check out library e-books on it (I'm told this is totes possible??).
--Buy a book through Room of One's Own's website for it.
--attempt to read manga on it, and see what happens

Comments

[lindorie]

Ahhhh thanks for the links! I've had my Kindle since last Christmas but I've never gotten around to getting fanfic on it! Then again I just got into AO3~

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

[jesse_the_k]

What is the Word Processor on your computer?

It's quite possible for older edocuments to lack the correct line ending — that's probably what's happening with Lullabye.

There are three ways to define "the end of a line" on personal computers:

1. PC use two characters: CR + LF (carriage return moves the next character to the left margin; line feed moves the next character ahead to the next line.)
2. Old Mac uses one character: CR
3. OSX, Linux & other Unix use one character: LF

None of these characters actually print. Since they define the behavior of another device, they're called "control characters."

In a true HTML document, none of those characters do squat. Instead there must be explicit, printing character commands:
<p> paragraph
<br> line break
or a command that does multiple things, one of which includes a new line. (For example, </cut> in DW adds a blank line.)

I know a fuckton about this shit, and would be happy to help you out F2F.

[laceblade]

This comment never came through to my e-mail; so annoying!

I should clarify - it's not just copying/pasting text from Lullabye that does it. It happens if I copy/paste from an e-mail, from things I write in Scrivener, whatever.

The Word Processor I have is Word Works, it came with the laptop instead of Microsoft Word, :[

[jesse_the_k]

I suspect that the act of copy-pasting may be part of the problem.

(Scrivener available for Windows now WOWOWOWOW)

(Arghh, just spent the entire day wanting to set my cable modem on fire, so my troubleshooting skills are kapooey. Have you checked the Mobile Read forums which seem to have useful info re: Kobo (and you were sounding quite tech skilled, I must add).)