I’m pretty confident it’s from behind and not from the sides but I could be wrong.
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I have the same one. I took it with me to Spain 
Kindle is not backlit. That is the whole point of reading of kindle instead of tablet. You have no direct light coming towards your eyes.
In kindle, light is around the edges and the direction is facing the screen, so you see a reflection of the light from the screen. (similar to cinema or projector). This is much easier for the eyes.
Personally I like kindle, but it’s not a perfect device. I’m a bit disappointed that the screen did not improve as much over the years. Contrast is stil not great (no black on white, it’s dark gray text of light gray background).
The Paperwhite’s built-in lighting does give very even illumination, backlight or not. I normally keep it pretty low and use a reading lamp myself, but I’d probably have no trouble reading with the built-in lighting alone if I wanted to. (It is kind of a bluish light, I think, but it is indirect.)
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I forgot this was even nominated here. Given the older style, I think I’ll just watch the new anime adaption since that uses a more modern style.
Oh, also I think I mentioned この美術部には問題がある before. Does anyone want me to nominate it? The anime adaption was funny, but someone else should probably let me know if the difficulty seems reasonable. (I remember thinking it was when a read the sample a couple months back, but someone should really check me on that.)
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Has anyone read Planetes yet? I own the first volume because the plot sparked my interest (haven’t started it yet though). I would love to read it with a book club and want to nominate it here but I have to check the difficulty level first. I’m a bit worried about the vocab because it’s a science fiction manga…
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I’ve read the whole series in English.
Honestly like the anime better.
I haven’t yet, but I was considering reading my free copy of volume 1 in the next month or two. I imagine it would be too difficult for the beginner book club, between the lack of furigana and the sci-fi setting.
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Ah, really no furigana 
Easily mitigated if someone populates the vocab list ahead of time 
Sounds like we have a volunteer 
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Foolish motals!
Sure I’ll do it but gonna probably be even slower than I am now 
maybe you can coordinate something with the floflo side and get a dump of the Kanji… For say any book wo furigana. Just an idea.
The problem for FloFlo is that it’s not text but images. If you type it, I don’t mind proof reading it.
Offtopic... floflo
Then how does all the text get into floflo? I thought it was all automatically parsed…that’s why I suggested maybe doing that then you’d get all the kanji (in theory most of it at least)… then it’s potentially easier to build the vocab…
It doesn’t work for manga without an extra (error prone) step. With books, it just parses text. But for manga it has to convert images to text and then parse that text.
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that said… I’m 4 pages behind in the current book just to catch up to Friday and then ch 2.2 behind…so no one probably wants me to do it… Id’ be happy to but I’m so slow! You’d finish 2 books by the time I got through it.
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Off topic
To add to @seanblue’s reply, here’s how a line of text appears in an e-book:
<p>「あのう、<ruby>霧<rt>きり</rt></ruby>の<ruby>谷<rt>たに</rt></ruby>へはどういったらいいんですか？」</p>
This can easily be parsed out to:
「あのう、霧の谷へはどういったらいいんですか？」
Or even:
「あのう、霧の谷へはどういったらいいんですか？」
From there, it’s then put into a Japanese tokenizer/morphological analyzer program to break it up into individual words.
Now, consider this manga image:
Because it’s an image, not computer text, you have to run it through a program to “recognize” the text in it. That gets you something like this:
ダメ輝よ私ー・ ,,ぃ爪
学校に行かなきゃ! ~縄 ~
ヱ数
もふもふLてたら確実に
遅刻しちゃラ!
` \\ヽ ~ ` , ,\ 〈『ヽハ
・_(・.‥`y⑩ `〉, ハタ,
L,〟ヽ~ 〟,},〟 {齢這
" ・_ M\ヽ ヽ
寸 。 `~ _ \
/ . \ , ~〟謄 \ \
\遽 ~ `_`
仁 , でも三でもでも!
If you have some advanced recognition software, it can do an okay job at recognizing where the text is and ignore the non-text parts of the image. Then you get this:
ダメ濾ょ私!
学校に行かなきゃ!
もふもふLてこら ニ
遅刻しちゃラ‥ 確実【
でも三でもでも!
As you can see, there’s a lot of clean-up needed at this point. And that’s before factoring in any “fancy” fonts that are more difficult to read, or instances where two letters look very similar in a font (or the font is a bit small and blurry).
And anything with furigana completely destroys any attempts to extract the text. I’m sure someone has come up with algorithms to recognize furigana and ignore it, though. Or at least some people are likely working on it.
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Well, it does not have to be done immediately, since it would be needed after the current book at the earliest, but yes, it’s a huge time sink. Which is why I think it’s unlikely to happen.
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Typing up manga dialogue is quick and fun! …for the first chapter or two.
Time sink is definitely the right wording for it!
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