Reading Chinese/Japanese on the Kindle, Part II
Posted on October 11, 2009 at 9:33 pm by kyliu
Tags: chinese, ebooks, hardware, japanese, kindle, kindle2, unicode
Filed Under geek | 2 Comments |
[Updated 12/9/09: Added some suggestions on how to make your Kindle display both English and Chinese content with the best fonts.]
[Updated 11/29/09: See the latest update on firmware 2.3 here.]
I’ve written before about the lack of support for Unicode on the Amazon Kindle. I also mentioned the Unicode Fonts Hack as a possible solution, but one which I could not endorse as I did not try it out personally.
Well, I’ve been reading some Chinese novels recently, and decided to take the opportunity to try the hack out. I can tell you right now that if you are literate in Chinese or Japanese and would like to read books in these languages on the Kindle, the Unicode fonts hack is the way to go. It makes your Kindle suddenly about twice as useful as before.
(I still can’t “endorse” it without qualification because you are taking a risk by trying out this hack, but I definitely like the result. You shouldn’t try this if you are uncomfortable with character encodings and general tech hackery.)
Pros:
- The Chinese / Japanese display is excellent (the hack uses the Google Android Droid fonts)
- Everything works, including highlighting, clipping, bookmarking, etc. (Though there’s no way to type Chinese in your own notes.) You can still read all your English books as before, and you haven’t lost any functionality (except for bold and italics, see below).
Cons:
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The Droid fonts also are used for English books. I don’t think the fonts work as well for English text. You lose italics and bolding, which can be a problem. I feel also that the shapes of the letters are too narrow and dense — but this is a matter of personal taste. You may actually prefer the Droid fonts to the default Kindle fonts.
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The hack makes your Kindle slightly unstable (this is almost certainly due to the fact that the Chinese fonts take up a great deal more memory). My Kindle crashes on me about once a day, which causes me to lose my place in the book but doesn’t result in other negatives. Sometimes you can’t turn the page with a Chinese book, and the Kindle would freeze and you have to reset it.
Things to Note:
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Amazon’s free email conversion process can convert text files in utf-8 into Kindle .azw files, and the results (as you can see from the picture above — the blurriness is just a compression artifact) look great. However, you do need to do some work to prepare the text files. For example, to get the best looking paragraph breaks and indents, you should ensure that there’s a blank line between each paragraph in the text file.
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If you load straight text files onto the Kindle, note that hard line breaks will result in uneven lines on the Kindle display (which is why you should use the email conversion process).
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Thanks for the article. BTW, the book you used as the sample above (Xiao Ao Jian Hu) is my favorite of all Jin Yong’s Wu Xia novels…
Thanks! 笑傲江湖 is my favorite as well, though I do have a soft spot for 白马啸西风 as well.