For years customers have been asking, practically begging, for hyphenation and an option for left-aligned text. Now (a few weeks ago), Amazon has announced the new generation of their ereader, the Kindle Voyage. And apparently it still lacks both features. Wohoo.

Let’s talk about hyphenation first. I feel like this is the more important of the two, because you’d really want hyphenation no matter how the text is aligned. I do think that Amazon should implement auto-hyphenation, but on the other hand, I am kind of puzzled why publishers don’t provide hyphenation themselves, especially for books with lots of uncommon words, where auto-hyphenation would fail anyway. I run every book not bought through Amazon (because I’m too lazy to figure out how to break the DRM) through the hyphenation plugin in Calibre, which takes like five seconds and produces really good results that don’t interfere with search or dictionary lookups or annotations. As hard as it is to believe, it actually works — I’ve been reading hyphenated stuff every day for weeks now, and it’s amazing. The obvious trade-off is that you have to store about 500kb extra in a 5mb book, but the Kindle file format is so size-inefficient compared to epub that that shouldn’t matter anyway.

Now, about the left-alignment problem. I have to admit, I actually like justified text. I’m fine with left-aligned text on the web and on home-printed documents, but I think (for the most part) books should be justified. Especially on the Kindle — I’m not sure why — left-aligned text looks kind of weird. I’ve tried it with and without hyphenation, and I’ve always felt like I’m looking at a cheap homemade document instead of an actual book. So even now, with all the terrible, awful, hideous gaps in the text, I still kind of prefer the status quo to the “fully-justified text needs to die”-mentality you see on the web these days. Also, in my experience, with hyphenation, justified text looks perfectly adequate.

That said, it’s completely baffling to me why they don’t give users the option to choose whichever alignment they prefer. The only reason I can think of is that non-tech-savvy authors upload their impossible-to-parse Word files to KDP and Amazon isn’t confident they can detect which parts of the text should be affected by the setting and which shouldn’t. But even that doesn’t seem overly plausible.

Humanity has figured out how to make printed books look awesome. It can’t be that hard to make ebooks look okay.

It’s 21:30; I’m alone in my room. The doorbell rings, six or seven times in hurried succession. I freeze. I was about to go to sleep, but now I can’t. I put all my clothes back on, turn off the lights, and don’t move, try not to make a sound. I tell myself nothing bad is going to happen, but my pulse won’t slow down.

I wonder who is at the door. I don’t get surprise visitors. If the people at the door wanted to visit someone else in the house, they could ring their doorbell. If they lived somewhere in the building, they could use a key. The janitor doesn’t work that late, and besides, this was the front door of the house, not the door to my room. He knocks before entering my room, but he uses his key for the other door; so it’s not him, either. It’s way too late in the night for someone like that survey-woman who showed up earlier today. I contemplate using the intercom to ask who’s there, but I’m too scared. I pretend I’m not home.

A while later, I can hear the buzzing of the lock through the staircase, followed by voices and footsteps. I try not to breathe until there’s silence again. Then I wait for a few more minutes and go to bed, still afraid. My heart beats so violently I can feel it throughout my entire body.

Consciously, I know that I’m pretty safe where I am. Even when I go outside, my chances of getting into serious trouble are extremely slim. All this is just in my head. And I can live with an irrational fear of being robbed and beaten whenever I leave the house after dark, but when I can’t feel safe in my own home anymore, that’s another story. I need this one place to be my sanctuary, where no one can get to me, no matter what.

Maybe one day I’ll figure out how not to be so afraid of everything, and maybe then it’ll be okay when people ring my doorbell unannounced. But that day has not come yet. Right now, I’m scared to death every time that happens, and I can’t do anything about it—except whinge about it a lot, of course.

My fanfiction/review-type-thing of the first 3 Old Man’s War books.

Spoilers.

Old Man’s War

In the beginning there was that annoying guy, but then he died, and the rest was just lots of explosions and it was really exciting.

The Ghost Brigades

“But it’s not what Jared wanted, is it?” Sagan said. “He knew his consciousness had been recorded. He could have asked me to try to save it. He didn’t.”

Then they decide to do it anyway, and Jared says, “Thank goodness you revived me. Between all the exploding things and people dying I totally forgot that my consciousness had been recorded. I thought I would have to sacrifice myself, but this is so much better!”

The Last Colony

So John talks to General Rybicki, and he’s like,

“And because you didn’t survey this planet well enough to know it has its own goddamned intelligent species, seven of my colonists have died in the last three days.”

And then the General should have said, “Oh, yea, we noticed they were here, but then we kinda forgot about them; that’s why we didn’t tell you.”

And then John should have said, “Oh, well, we’ll just forget about them, too, then,” because after that the only other occasion this comes up is when John asks Gau what he’s going to do with them and Gau says, “Meh, dunno,” and then forgets about it as well.

Other than that the books were pretty entertaining, though.