E-readers
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Who here uses an E-reader? I mostly just use my phone and Surface Pro to read these, but only issue I have with them is the glare on the screen is so bad! so mostly just curious what everyone's preferred device is to read these books on.
BEWARE of the Pimpin Purple Pineapple! Because one day he will take over the world and rule us all with his rusty wooden spoon!
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I mostly use a Kindle Paperwhite 3. It's really nice compared to trying to read on my phone or a computer screen. Honestly couldn't stand the JNC app and pretty much uninstalled it soon as I downloaded it. Even reading on other apps like Kobo's wasn't very nice on the phone.
You can adjust the font size and screen brightness pretty easily and there is no glare to speak off. The only real downside is that Kindle uses proprietary formats so if you buy one, you pretty much can only use DRM free epubs (by converting them to Mobi) or Amazon's own books. Basically all other sales platforms but JNC use DRM on their epubs, which kind of sucks. Amazon takes a larger cut of royalties than other services, so if you care about supporting the author's/publishers you might not like that.
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I use, in order of frequency, Kindle Paperwhite, iPhone, a pair of 10" Android tablets (different brands), and the computer. Anything in the way of manga requires the tablets, in my opinion, because otherwise the lettering is too small.
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I mostly use a Kindle Paperwhite 3. It's really nice compared to trying to read on my phone or a computer screen. Honestly couldn't stand the JNC app and pretty much uninstalled it soon as I downloaded it. Even reading on other apps like Kobo's wasn't very nice on the phone.
You can adjust the font size and screen brightness pretty easily and there is no glare to speak off. The only real downside is that Kindle uses proprietary formats so if you buy one, you pretty much can only use DRM free epubs (by converting them to Mobi) or Amazon's own books. Basically all other sales platforms but JNC use DRM on their epubs, which kind of sucks. Amazon takes a larger cut of royalties than other services, so if you care about supporting the author's/publishers you might not like that.
Another thing I've noticed is they are also only black and white correct?
BEWARE of the Pimpin Purple Pineapple! Because one day he will take over the world and rule us all with his rusty wooden spoon!
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@Tiko424 One of the Kindles does have a color version and the Kindle app on the Fire HD isn't that bad. Still better than using the Kobo App on the phone.
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@db0ssman I will have to look into it more
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I import all my epubs to Play Books. I then either use my phone 70%, Mars Likebook 25%, or other Android tablets 5%. If not on the Likebook I use white text on black and personally have no issues with glare. Probably use my phone most just due to convenience.
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I import all my epubs to Play Books. I then either use my phone 70%, Mars Likebook 25%, or other Android tablets 5%. If not on the Likebook I use white text on black and personally have no issues with glare. Probably use my phone most just due to convenience.
So far I've been running a Calibre server to read it via Firefox everywhere for the epubs
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I use a Kindle, but all my purchases are through either JNC themselves or Google Books.
I would avoid buying actual Kindle books from now on though even if the deleted books is just a mistake on Amazon's part.
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@Tiko424 Yea I've thought of doing similar, but overall like my probably needlessly complicated setup. I have Calibre library in my One Drive which allows me to easily add epubs from any of my PC's or laptops. Then with the Calibre companion app connect the One Drive to access the epub to then upload to Playbooks. I've tried the other popular reading apps but always come back to playbooks.
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@Tiko424 Yea I've thought of doing similar, but overall like my probably needlessly complicated setup. I have Calibre library in my One Drive which allows me to easily add epubs from any of my PC's or laptops. Then with the Calibre companion app connect the One Drive to access the epub to then upload to Playbooks. I've tried the other popular apps but always come back to playbooks.
I actually have it set up same way lol
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If you're using a phone or tablet, then setting the e-reader app to dark mode will help considerably. And of course, lowering the brightness will help as well.
Tablets have a serious advantage over e-ink readers in that you can get tablets with way more storage than you can get e-ink readers (which doesn't matter all that much for novels but matters a lot for manga). Also, if you have a normal, Android tablet, you have a lot of flexibility with which apps you run, whereas e-ink readers are usually associated with a store, meaning that the books from that store can be downloaded directly, but everything else has to be sideloaded. With a tablet, you can choose to use the apps for each store and sideload only books that aren't associated with an app (e.g. JNC's premium editions), or if you've stripped the DRM from the books, you can just sideload everything and then use the same e-reader app for everything.
e-ink readers are easier on the eyes and have better battery life, but pretty much everything else about them is worse than a tablet. And in my experience, using dark mode and lowering the brightness solves the eye problem with tablets (though YMMV, since that depends on your eyes).
Another thing I've noticed is they are also only black and white correct?
Because of how e-ink works, it can't have even close to the full range of colors that you can get with an LCD display, and for quite a while, the best that they could do was B&W. AFAIK, there are no e-ink e-readers currently on the market which use color (there are Kindles with color, but AFAIK, they're all Android tablets which have been locked down, making them a really poor choice over normal, Android tablets). However, it sounds like we may start getting color e-ink readers in the near future. Their color will not be even vaguely close to as good as LCD screens though.
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@Kalessin They just released an e-ink e-reader with color.
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@Village-Idiot The link for the iReader C6 says it has 16GB of space; I don't have an e-reader or know much about them, but would that be enough storage to use it for manga as well as LNs? Or would you want more GBs for a manga-reading device?
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@Kalessin I only use dark mode anyway just doesn't help always screen is to reflective... That's the only issues I end up with and like I said most the time I use my Surface I don't really care for a tablet that can't do anything I can do on a computer...
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@MasterLillyclaw said in E-readers:
@Village-Idiot The link for the iReader C6 says it has 16GB of space; I don't have an e-reader or know much about them, but would that be enough storage to use it for manga as well as LNs? Or would you want more GBs for a manga-reading device?
I think it would be great if I could just have one that let me read everything off my server... Then it wouldn't matter how big it was because I would technically have basically unlimited storage space...
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Both depends on the size of your digital collection.
For Light Novels, yes, most volumes are around 5-20mb each. You can load hundreds onto it. But like I said, it depends on your collection.
For Manga, yes, but big series like say, Dragon Ball, Naruto, One Piece, etc will eat up chunks of it. I highly recommend a program called Kindle Comic Converter. It will auto-format the manga volumes into the right resolution for the e-reader, which will reduce the size of the series. For example, a manga on Kindle is around 60-100mb, a high-res version will be around 400mb, but there's no point having that high resolution images on a Kindle.
It will also depend on how big the OS will take up as well. You should buy it with the expectations that it'll have around 10-12gb or so available.
If you're serious about reading manga, I'd recommend 32gb and something like the Kindle Oasis due to the larger screen size.
Also note that for e-ink e-readers, one of the big issues is that it takes a long time to load the next page for manga. The Kindle loads them kinda quick, but I don't know how fast the iReader C6 will load them, you should look at reviews first for that one. Also note that it doesn't have an English OS atm, just Chinese.
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@Village-Idiot I watched the videos of the iReader C6, and that thing was drawing full color screens faster than my 1st gen Kindle drew black and white text. You wouldn't BELIEVE how slow that Kindle was at greyscale graphics--the Paperwhite I use now is much faster, but not THIS fast.. The C6 has 4 video modes from highest quality to fastest refresh, and apparently the fastest mode is actually labelled "video" mode. Too bad they didn't demonstrate any video playback (would have been difficult anyway since they were limited to Baidu's website).
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@MasterLillyclaw said in E-readers:
I don't have an e-reader or know much about them, but would that be enough storage to use it for manga as well as LNs?
And have all your collection on the device all the time? I doubt it. You'd have to have a fairly small collection for any e-ink reader to be able hold it. The largest I've seen is 32 GB. The size of a volume of manga varies (generally from around 100 MB to 300 MB), but it adds up. For instance, Black Cat (20 volumes) is about 2.5 GB. Ten series like that and 25 GB of space is gone. That obviously won't fit on a 16 GB device, and it wouldn't take many more series before the 32 GB device couldn't hold it (and it's even worse if the device uses some portion of its reported storage for its OS). So, I'd say that any serious manga collection cannot possibly fit on an e-ink device, though if you only have a couple of series, it would probably be fine. And of course, you can always just download the manga that you're currently reading to your device and remove it when you're done, but e-ink devices just don't have enough storage to hold a lot of manga.
Tablets on the other hand could have as much as 128 GB or even 256 GB of internal space as well as an SD card slot for more. It's a completely different ballgame and one of the reasons that I don't use e-ink devices.
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@Village-Idiot said in E-readers:
Both depends on the size of your digital collection.
Also note that it doesn't have an English OS atm, just Chinese.Currently, my digital collection is zero, lol :^) Although my dream is to have a nice solid collection eventually. But thank you for the info! And yes, I saw that the iReader C6 doesn't have an English OS yet, although I don't plan on getting a reader anytime soon, so that shouldn't be an issue regardless of what I eventually decide on.
So, I'd say that any serious manga collection cannot possibly fit on an e-ink device, though if you only have a couple of series, it would probably be fine. And of course, you can always just download the manga that you're currently reading to your device and remove it when you're done, but e-ink devices just don't have enough storage to hold a lot of manga.
Tablets on the other hand could have as much as 128 GB or even 256 GB of internal space as well as an SD card slot for more. It's a completely different ballgame and one of the reasons that I don't use e-ink devices.I really don't want to have to resort to removing items from my device because of space issues, that and having color are important to me. Looks like I'll probably be investing in a tablet rather than an e-reader, when I get around to it. Thank you for the info!
