Kelsie and I semi-recently sold almost all our hard-copy books and re-purchased them digitally. Instead of shelves and shelves of books that had gotten unwieldy to store and move all the time, we now have a couple dedicated devices for e-reading that store our entire library at our fingertips. I decided on a Microsoft Surface. It runs Windows on an Intel processor, meaning I knew I'd be able to run whatever software I wanted without issues, as opposed to having an ARM processor or non-Windows device like an android. It has a large FHD screen for when I want to read my comics, a decent battery life, it's lightweight, etc. All in all, I've been quite pleased with my new reading experience, but there was one area that had pained me, twice now.
A book I've been pretty excited for came out last week. It is an encyclopedia of every Dreamcast game with pictures and a bit of info about each one. Most e-books are just text, or just text with a couple images intermixed where it doesn't really matter where/when they show up. I prefer a program called Freda for most of my eBook reading because I can set my fonts/colors/sizes/etc the way I want for my best reading experience. However, there are a couple books that you don't want your reader to mess with the formatting, like art books or your new Dreamcast Encyclopedia that you wanted to read on release day but got screwed by all software everywhere somehow >:(
Many art books like this come in PDF or some such format for this reason, but sometimes they're still packaged as an EPUB, and sometimes that EPUB won't convert to a PDF no matter what you do lol. I must have downloaded and tried at least 25 different readers trying to get one to render my new book correctly, but every EPUB reader messes with the formatting/layout/etc. So, filled with the rage of several demons, I decided to write my own.
Over the weekend Kelsie and I created what I've concisely named "Kelsam Fixed Format EPUB Reader" or KFFER :P It is a basic reader utility for Fixed Format EPUBs like the ones I've been describing, guaranteed to not mess with any formatting/layout and simply render its contents on page canvases. I was originally planning to publish it as a Chrome Extension, but apparently Chrome Extensions and Vue.js go together like oil and water, so instead it's just hosted on our server.
If you or a loved one have suffered from fixed format EPUB abuse, head this way: https://reader.kelsam.net
