Downloadable juvenile literature (or easy books)

September 7, 2010 at 07:19 AM

I have recently purchased a Kindle (an e-book reader), this time it is able to render Chinese both traditional and simplified. And quite beautifully.

I want to load some Chinese texts but there is not even one e-book in Chinese at Amazon. Books from Gutenberg project (copyright expired books) are too difficult for me(they are the big classics...).

I would like something like harry potter, maybe even easier some up to 10 years old kind of book.

Not difficult to read but not plainly lame. Short stories should be nice also.

The device can read .txt and .pdf so anything I can copy paste to a .txt file should be ok. I was even considering copy/paste-ing Wikipedia articles to .txt files. Informative but I guess it won't make an exciting read.

September 7, 2010 at 07:53 AM

If you don't mind installing emule you can probably find quite a bit of stuff on Verycd.com - here's some Harry Potter for you. There's quite a lot of stuff available, but you need to know what you're looking for as it's rarely in an easily browsable format. They're also often scans rather than official ebook versions, so you get OCR errors.

September 7, 2010 at 07:59 AM

When I said Harry Potter, it was more an example than preference

Anyway thank you very much, I will try it once I move (I live in university dormitory now and Emule is filtered)

September 7, 2010 at 02:53 PM

Would you be interested in comics? They are often in some graphics format (e.g. gif), not sure if the kindle can read that, but you might be able to convert them to pdf.

September 7, 2010 at 03:34 PM

The Kindle's 600x800 pixel resolution doesn't suggest a great comic-reading experience. I have tried reading Harry Potter in Chinese, I wouldn't recommend it unless you are a fairly advanced reader. I once downloaded several of the Harry Potter books in Chinese. I did a text analysis on the first book and it requires knowing at least 2400 characters.

Anyway, here is an index of some English language novels translated into Chinese (note that some entries are not novels, if they have an active "小说" link then it is a novel).

http://comic.92wy.co.../list_t_9_1.htm

I think it is a good start. They have stuff like the Twilight Saga, Da Vinci Code, Lord of the Rings, Ender's Game, Dune, Agatha Christie, etc. The same site also has many translations of Japanese novels, but it's less likely that you'll be familiar with them.

I guess if you wanted to you could use the Stanza Desktop client to create ebook files, but if the Kindle can handle plain text then it's probably not worth the trouble.

It is really not too hard to find interesting reading material in Chinese, but most of it is still too hard for me so I just read Chinese comics.

September 7, 2010 at 04:17 PM

Thank you very much. I almost got a heart attack when you mentioned Dune. That will be my first download.

I found a tool called mangle for the comics. I will test it tomorrow also.

September 7, 2010 at 05:05 PM

The page for the Dune series is here:

http://comic.92wy.com/go/info_5005.htm

Looks like only the first 3 books are available.

September 27, 2010 at 05:48 AM

Can we get an update? I'm starting to think about buying a Kindle, but I don't quite understand the Kindle 3's Chinese support. For example, some people online claim that only Chinese PDFs will work, but not Chinese ebooks or text files.

September 28, 2010 at 08:36 PM

I had a friend convert my epub file to mobi format using Calibre and upload it to his Kindle 3. Some of the characters look OK, but there are a lot of squares in the place of certain characters.

So, the verdict is that Kindle 3's support for Chinese ebooks is there, but incomlete. If Amazon releases a firmware update, this issue can be fixed. I probably won't risk buying a Kindle until they either fix it or someone releases a Unicode font hack.

UPDATE:

Apparently someone has released a font hack that allows all Chinese characters to display in ebooks:

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=88004

I guess I ought to go buy a Kindle now ;)

October 12, 2010 at 07:57 PM

I have tried with calibre also and it didn't work.

But if you send a pdf or txt to your_user@free.kindle.com you receive by email a file on the Kindle format that works perfectly (so far I have converted only 3 or 4 files)

I think the hack was needed with kindle 2 but it is not needed with Kindle 3

October 12, 2010 at 08:11 PM

Right, I've heard that .pdf and .txt files are OK, but what I really want is to be able to read my Chinese ebooks as ebooks, so that the Kindle saves my place, syncs between different devices, lets me annotate the pages, etc.

As far as I know, that's not possible with .pdf and .txt files.

Also, I'm sad to say that the comic.92wy.com website has been down for roughly two weeks. It's not the only Chinese website that allows you to read free books, but I still haven't found another website that had as many interesting titles all in the same place. For now, I'm using Sina's 外国小说 collection, but it really doesn't compare.

http://vip.book.sina.com.cn/pub/cate.php?cd=serial&c=001026&dpc=1

November 27, 2014 at 02:13 AM

If anyone would like to message me where I can get/purchase an official version of the ebook of the harry potter in traditional or simplified (both if possibe), I would be very grateful.