@Ree@Dreamwidth.org

The lying thing! Calibre claimed to help me delete the accidentally doubled book—but it didn't. I am still going to have to back up my books and annotations, factory reset my Kindle (a-fucking-gain), and put no more than one of each book back. Until I do, things will continue to be wonky and untenable. The most it did was get the Kindle to finish indexing books for search, and God only knows if it even did that right. Ugh.

Once again Calibre turns out to be more trouble than it's worth. Hellscape program is not even sorry. "You misclicked, so now all your epubs will open in me! There's no Undo for this!" Do Not Want. "I can fuck up your metadata for you!" It was serviceable before; mitts off, you monster. "I can solve this problem for you!" Cool, do it then.... Wait, did you do anything? "LOL nope!"

Probably I need to resign myself to using the Kindle strictly for content locked with Amazon DRM and the Kobo Aura for everything else. The Aura feels nice to use and it reads pretty much every practical format (including non-DRM MOBI). I am pretty sure the Aura has had the same book in different formats at the same time and it was fine, which would be prevent a lot of hassle for me.

Books, though. Books are good. Uprooted is lovely and the last chapter in particular gives me feels and opinions. I just finished the first Rachel Peng novel (Digital Divide), thinking it would be a pleasant diversion, and now I need to pricecheck the rest of the series because it's stuck in my grey matter in this really delicious way. Books delight me.

The hardware and software that supports them.... somewhat less so.

I have gotten increasingly dissatisfied with my old Kindle Paperwhite 2 and wanted to try something that would natively read EPUB files. Managed to snag an old Kobo Mini for a song. I wasn't sure if I could cope with the lack of a lit screen, but I was willing to try.

Well. turns out I really, really miss that light. I like the interface, like holding the smaller device, but I don't love the correspondingly small screen and the dimness rankles constantly.

So now I have a lead on a slightly bigger, lit Kobo instead. What to do with the Mini?

Well, its small size and glass-free screen make it sturdy. The sleep cover adds some protection. And.... my kid likes it. Likes putting it in and out of sleep mode. Likes practicing letters in the Sketch Pad. Also I have a modest library of public domain children's books, all in DRM-free EPUB. Yup.

Guess I'll have to look into Kobo parental controls. :)

But I'm keeping the Mini until its successor arrives!