Writing a novel is a dream for many, and getting published even more so. With the development of digital reading and ebooks, it’s becoming easier and easier to distribute and sell ebooks (some even become millionaires, as you’ll read in this article).
Contrary to popular belief, writing the first draft of a book, novel or essay is quite easy.
All you need to do is draw up a plan and think in terms of the number of words to be written per day.
Here’s the word count for a novel:
Minimum: Around 40,000 words is the absolute minimum for a novel. It would be on the very short side, but some publishers might consider it.
Average: Most novels fall between 70,000 and 100,000 words. This range gives you room to develop characters, plot, and setting.
Genre can affect length: Some genres, like romance, can be shorter (around 50,000 words) while fantasy or historical fiction may be longer (up to 120,000 words).
And here’s the calculator to work out how many words you need to write per day to get to the end of your book:
<form id="word-count-form">
<label for="novel-length">Target Novel Length (words):</label>
<input type="number" id="novel-length" name="novel-length" min="40000" value="40000" required>
<br>
<label for="writing-days">Number of Writing Days:</label>
<input type="number" id="writing-days" name="writing-days" min="1" value="20" required>
<br>
<button class="submit success button" type="submit">Calculate Daily Word Count</button>
</form>
<p class="label" id="result">You need to write approximately 2000 words per day to complete your novel in 20 days.</p>
<script>
const form = document.getElementById(‘word-count-form’);
const result = document.getElementById(‘result’);
form.addEventListener(‘submit’, function(event) {
event.preventDefault();
const novelLength = parseInt(document.getElementById(‘novel-length’).value);
const writingDays = parseInt(document.getElementById(‘writing-days’).value);
if (novelLength < 40000) {
result.textContent = "Novel length must be at least 40,000 words.";
return;
}
const dailyWordCount = Math.ceil(novelLength / writingDays);
result.textContent = You need to write approximately ${dailyWordCount} words per day to complete your novel in ${writingDays} days.;
});
</script>
As you can see you only need to write for a mounth in order to write a short novel!
The Pocketbook e-reader range is getting bigger every day, or at least that’s the impression I get from regularly visiting their website. The announcement of a new reader, the Pocketbook InkPad Eo, comes as no surprise, and we’ll see what this machine has in store for us.
E Ink has been at the forefront of e-ink technology for years, and their Kaleido color displays have been a popular choice for e-readers. However, with the recent release of the Kaleido 3, it’s time to take a look at how these two generations of displays compare.
Real-World Comparison
To get a better sense of the differences between Kaleido 1 and Kaleido 3 displays, I compared two e-readers: the Vivlio Color (which uses a Kaleido 1 display) and the Bigme S6 Color+ (which uses a Kaleido 3 display).
Note: the Vivlio Color is a Pocketbook Color with a Kaleido 1 screen rebranded for the french market. It is technically the same as a Pocketbook Color.
Picture: Kaleido 3 (left) and Kaleido 1 (right)
As you can see, the Kaleido 3 display on the Bigme S6 Color+ produces colors that are significantly deeper and more varied than the colors on the Vivlio Color’s Kaleido 1 display.
The text on the Kaleido 3 display is also sharper and easier to read.
Comparison with Tablets
While tablet displays offer even more vibrant colors, it’s important to remember that e-ink displays are designed to mimic the look of paper.
As a result, the colors on e-ink displays are less harsh and more eye-friendly for long reading sessions.
As you can see in the image above, the tablet’s LED display produces a much higher contrast than the e-ink displays. However, the colors on the tablet are also oversaturated and "bleed" together, making the image look less natural.
Comparison with Printed Paper
When compared to printed paper, the Kaleido 3 display on the Bigme S6 Color+ comes surprisingly close.
The colors are not quite as rich as the printed paper, but the overall reading experience is very similar.
Conclusion
The Kaleido 3 display is a significant improvement over the Kaleido 1 display. The colors are richer, the text is sharper, and the refresh rate is faster.
If you’re looking for the best possible e-ink reading experience, then a Kaleido 3 display is the way to go.
While the Kaleido 3 technology is mature, there is still room for improvement. I would like to see even richer colors, a higher resolution, and an even faster refresh rate in future generations of e-ink displays.
Overall, I am very impressed with the Kaleido 3 display. It is a major step forward for e-ink technology and I believe that it will continue to improve in the years to come.
This will come as no great surprise to observers: the German e-reader brand Tolino is also announcing color e-readers: the Tolino Shine Color and Tolino Vision Color.
Tolino is a brand that only distributes in certain European countries, such as Germany. In recent years, it has signed a partnership agreement with Kobo, which supplies the e-readers.
The Tolino Shine Color is the Kobo Clara Colour with a 6-inch screen featuring Kaleido 3 color e-ink.
The Tolino Vision Color is an adaptation of the Kobo Libra Colour with a 7-inch Kaleido 3 color e-ink screen.
Tolino e-readers are not distributed in the USA. So you’ll only come across them on certain e-commerce sites that import e-readers, or on the shelves of large German bookshops.
If you come across one, don’t buy it.
The integrated bookshop is designed to provide books in different languages, but very few in English or Spanish. Compatible booksellers include Thalia, Weltbild, Bucher and Hugendubel.
As these are Kobo e-readers, there’s no point in switching to a Tolino e-reader when Kobo e-readers are readily available in the USA – and almost everywhere else.
A new version of the Tolino Shine, based on the Kobo Clara BW, will also be available.
The release date for the new Tolino e-readers is a little surprising. While the new Kobo e-readers arrive at the end of April, these Tolino Shine Color and Tolino Vision Color e-readers are not expected until May and June 2024.
Have you heard about the latest Kobo color e-readers? They just rolled out a feature called FastGLR, and it’s a game changer. But what exactly is it, and why should you care, especially if you’re all about those vibrant color displays?
If you’re not familiar with E Ink, it’s pretty amazing. This display tech is designed to replicate that lovely ink-on-paper feel.
Unlike traditional screens like LCD or OLED that blast out light, E Ink screens reflect natural light, making them super easy on the eyes, even on sunny days! Plus, they’re fantastic for long reading sessions without straining your peepers.
But here’s the catch: E Ink has a bit of a slow side. That slower refresh rate is because of how it works: it's all about moving particles to create images. While this can be a bummer, it’s also what gives E Ink its standout features like incredible readability, low battery usage, and that cozy paper-like look we love.
Now, let’s chat about those Kaleido 3 e-Ink screens. They can be fine-tuned based on what you want to see. Think about it: if you prioritize rich color quality, you might have to deal with a slower refresh rate. On the flip side, if speed is your game, you might get decent colors but risk seeing some ghost images.
That’s where Kobo really shines with their new FastGLR technology! They teamed up with E Ink to create a system that ramps up the refresh rate while still keeping those colors bright and true. It’s a clever way for Kobo to set themselves apart from the crowd of e-reader brands out there.
It’s worth mentioning that while different brands may use the same E Ink tech, they each have their own twist on how text looks on the screen, thanks to their unique software, font choices, and systems like FastGLR.
Other players like Bigme and Onyx are also upping their game. For example, Onyx has a nifty feature called "Super Refresh BSR," which enhances color display while keeping the screen refresh nice and smooth.
Kobo is hitting back with a new 6-inch e-reader with a black and white screen. Nothing new, you may ask? Well, this e-reader comes with a latest-generation E Ink Carta 1300 screen at an unbeatable price.
You may have heard about the incredible way in which artificial intelligences like ChatGPT manage to learn the contents of the most popular books. Here's how the Internet giants managed to do it – and it's not pretty!
How AI knows about the content of a book?
First, here's a little essay in which I quizzed ChatGPT and its competitor Gemini by asking a question about the 3rd book in the Harry Potter saga (warning spoilers):
Image: a question about Harry Potter on Gemini (from Google)
Image: a question about Harry Potter on chatGPT (from openAI)
Then I asked the AIs how they knew that, and here's their answer:
> Gemini: I haven't personally read the Harry Potter books. […] In this case, I've likely accessed and processed information from sources like:[…] Digital copies of the books themselves
> ChatGPT: I've been trained on a diverse range of text, including summaries and analyses of popular books, which allows me to provide information about their content.
While Gemini clearly states that it had access to the text of the book (or not – it is not clear), ChatGPT is more evasive, stating that it only had access to publicly available data…
However, given the details known about many books, many people have speculated that artificial intelligences have used books to learn all this, which raises many questions.
But to get hold of a large number of well-known books and bestsellers, you need to get permission from the authors and publishers.
The problem is that this would take too much time, and would probably be rejected by many authors and organizations.
Another solution would be to buy the books one by one in paper or digital format and use them. But it would take a lot of time to buy hundreds of thousands of books.
So we had to find another way to enable artificial intelligences to read all these texts.
A quick way would be to "find" a ready-made collection of well-known books!
This is where the famous collection of ebooks known as "books3" comes in.
What is books3 and why does it change everything?
It's now accepted that books freely available on the Internet have been used to train and design artificial intelligences such as chatGPT.
These books include 2 collections called books1 (also known as bookcorpus) and books2.
These two archives contain thousands of books that raise no particular copyright issues. These are ebooks that are officially available free of charge on the Internet, either because they are in the public domain, or because their authors have decided to publish them free of charge on the web.
But in October 2020, Shawn Presser published the books3 collection, which contains almost 200,000 books, in the form of ebooks in TXT format, with a total weight of 37 GB.
This collection comes from an ebook piracy website known as bibliotik.
The complete collection is now available as a book download from The-Eye website. This site is designed by the EleutherAI organization, which provides content for the creation of new artificial intelligences to compete with Internet giants such as OpenAI, Google and Microsoft.
The Eye also offers a very large archive of AI data called "The Pile", weighing in at hundreds of gigabytes!
Today, the books3 collection is no longer freely available on the Internet, but there is every reason to believe that it is still widely used and distributed under the radar, far from the eyes of the general public.
Who used books3 and what were the consequences?
The first company to acknowledge the use of books3 was Meta (parent company of Facebook), which admitted in a Californian court that it had used this collection of books for its Llama artificial intelligence model.
As my tests show, ChatGPT (for GPT3 and especially GPT4) and Gemini (Google) are also suspected of having made extensive use of books3 to create their conversational chat. But there's no proof of this, and it's very difficult to know for sure.
Because of this, it seems difficult to create a relevant competitor to ChatGPT, LLama or Gemini without resorting to a large collection of published books.
It would therefore make sense for authors and publishers to license their works, or else legislate to prevent AIs from using copyrighted works.
Maybe you downloaded a giant fantasy saga or a comprehensive textbook. While these tomes offer hours of reading material, navigating them on your e-reader can be cumbersome. In this tutorial, we will see how to split an EPUB file into multiple chunks.
The figures for the US book market have just come in, and one piece of news is sure to delight digital book lovers: ebook sales topped the billion-dollar mark in 2023.
This is an impressive figure: in the USA, in 2023, digital books of the ebook (text) type brought in over a billion dollars (+0.6%)!
This figure covers sales of digital books for e-readers, of course, but also sales of ebooks to be read on computers (PDF documents), smartphones and tablets (ebooks from the apps from Google and Apple).
While printed books are holding up remarkably well, with estimated sales of almost $9 billion by 2023, the same cannot be said for physical audiobooks. Unsurprisingly, sales of physical audiobooks (in CD form) are down to a paltry $12.9 million.
Now, if we add up all these figures, we see that the book market is slightly down by 0.3% over the year 2023.
The market is therefore holding steady, with digital sales continuing to increase year on year.
Ever downloaded multiple ebooks of the same story, but wished you had them all in one file? Or maybe you have short stories you’d love to combine into a neat anthology.
