So it turns out that Kindle not only does not support Unicode, it seems that it can’t event handle Roman alphabet diacritics!
There are mainly two reasons why I wanted to get an eBook reader.
1) To read comfortably the enormous amount of content that Russian sites like http://lib.ru/ have. Oh well…
I just cannot believe that Amazon and Sony can invest so much money developing this hardware, while repeating all the errors of the pre-Unicode computer age…
2) I would love to replace several bookshelves of hideous computer books that I have with a small portable device. This doesn’t seem that promising either…none of O’Reilly books are yet available on Amazon as Kindle books. I would think that people working with computers would be among the first adapters and Amazon would have a strong incentive to make sure that they can get the books that they buy…maybe not…
As for Sony, things look even more dreadful. This screenshot below was taken today while browsing the “Sony Connect” bookstore:
4 Comments
i have been going through Lib.ru book publications for over a month now..have some down time. anyway, its pretty amazing and extremely convenient. i have to say though, i still prefer print on paper by far
Given a choice I do too…I printed out their books a couple of times, but given the single sided nature of a printout and lack of binding those sheets were so inconvenient to deal with.
You can have Russian on the Kindle easily now:
http://www.blogkindle.com/unicode-fonts-hack/
that works for Kindle2 only though