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Welcome Back!
Ok, I'm back. Hope everybody had a nice weekend, whether that meant spending time in church or with Chinese food.
Got a Kindle, so I look forward to reviewing some Kindle Shakespeare versions (already downloaded one that promised "254 plays poems and sonnets" and wanted to see what that math was all about ;)). Maybe I'll read more for pleasure now. I've always wanted to go back and read that Edgar Sawtelle one.
Got no "Shakespeare things", which was a little surprising. Can't remember if I blogged about this but at one point my 6yr old was reading my wife's computer over her shoulder, said "Hamlet!" and my wife said "Shhhhh!" so I thought maybe there was something in the works. I mentioned this to my wife after the fact, and she claimed to have no idea was talking about. So maybe she was contemplating something and changed her mind, who knows.
No Shakespeare content in this post, just saying Hi (I've got a real doozy coming up in the next one!). Feel free to comment at will if you're in the mood. Anybody get any good Shakespeare loot?
6 comments:
Hi Duane! I got some Shakespeare swag. The Comedy/Tragedy sweatshirt, with a clown-nosed Shakespeare on the front and a bloody dagger on the back. Also, I got Masterpuppet Theatre. It's very cool. I posted a video on my facebook page that I made with it: it's based on Jacques' "Seven Ages" speech. Do you want me to put it on the Shakespeare Geek Facebook Wall?
Got a Kindle last year and have not found it useful for Shakespeare. Lineation does not work well on Kindle, formatting is out the door and the loss of page numbers is often a drawback in scholarly works. I use mine purely for recreational purposes.
Very little in the way of "Shakespeare" stuff. I did get a Shakespeare nutcracker figure from a friend who looks for those type of knick-knacks for me. (He found a Shakespeare action figure for me one year.:) I think it's one of the neatest things I've seen--doublet and hose, real hair and beard, etc. A Shakespeare Nutcracker?-- only a real Shakespeare nut would get why I think it's the greatest. --So I feel safe posting about it here ;)
I don't have a reader--yet. A question (maybe a stupid one) for anyone more literate about these things than I am (which is most everyone, I'm sure)
If you format your own stuff, will it translate (upload) to any of the readers in that format, or will they all re-format it to fit their own?
In general, JM, the readers try to hedge their bets with a combination of support for their own proprietary format (like Amazon's AZW) and an open format, like MOBI. If you format your stuff into MOBI (using a free application like Calibre), then any device that reads MOBI will read that file.
However, much like the early days of HTML prior to the CSS revolution, you have no control over what happens after that. The Kindle, for example, will let you dynamically set not only font size, but also line spacing and "words per line", whatever that means. Plus, you've got readers with different sized screens, and so on. So short answer is no, you can never guarantee that your documents will look the same from one device to the next.
...that is, unless you scan them all in as images. People do that sometimes, and it's typically the way that a PDF file would be viewed. If you do that, then yeah, it looks the same everywhere. BUT, you lose about 90% of the functionality - all searching, cutting, pasting, highlighting, and so on.
One approach for those that simply must have perfect presentation every time is a mixture -- write your book about a Shakespeare verse, but then for that actual verse, make an image of it. But even this is not fool proof, as you'll be unable to guarantee that the image properly displays on the device without zooming/rotating or what have you.
Hey Duane, Appreciate you sharing the knowledge and taking the time to do the thorough rundown. Thanks much, JM
I got the Olivier's Shakespeare DVD collection!
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