Non-Latin character sets support in Nook Color ?

[alex_shin]

I have several questions eccential for multi-lingual users, who were left in the cold by previous editions fo Nook:

- Does Nook Color natively support EPUB (and other formats) with non-latin character set?

It was a limitation with the current version of Nook. (Well, there was an option to embed the font into EPUB document, but it makes the file big and navigation slow. My question is about NATIVE support of other languages).

- Will e-mail application and web browser support input using other character sets (Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Mandarin, etc.)

- Will the upcoming firmware update for B&W Nook include any changes in character sets support?

Thanks!

Alex.

[Michael-V]

@alex_shin,

NOOKcolor will work the same as NOOK regarding foreign character set support. Native support is Latin character set only.

[alex_shin]

Bummer... Too bad, I thought I could finally get one.

I am totally perplexed by this persistent lack of respect for other cultures that most big name e-reader producers exhibit time after time.

It is so technically simple ... I dont get why they choose to ignore, literally, billions of potential users. 

[Doug_Pardee Distinguished Bibliophile]

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alex_shin wrote:

I dont get why they choose to ignore, literally, billions of potential users. 

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Literally billions? There are only about 310 million people in the US, of whom it's estimated less than 15% speak (I don't know about read) a language other than English. That would be about 45 million.

[ABthree]

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Doug_Pardee wrote:

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Literally billions? There are only about 310 million people in the US, of whom it's estimated less than 15% speak (I don't know about read) a language other than English. That would be about 45 million.

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And a substantial number of those -- probably a majority -- speak/read Spanish, Polish, or another language that uses a variant of the Latin alphabet.

[Doug_Pardee Distinguished Bibliophile]

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ABthree wrote:

And a substantial number of those -- probably a majority -- speak/read Spanish, Polish, or another language that uses a variant of the Latin alphabet.

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At least the folks who read Italian, Hawai`ian, and Swahili are in good shape.

I was just taking issue with the characterization of "literally billions". If the poster had written "literally tens of millions", I'd've been quite satisfied. I have a tendency to be pedantic about words—as the folks in my writer's review group would certainly confirm—and the word literally has no business being used in an exaggeration.

By the way, the original poster was concerned about non-Latin alphabets, as opposed to the extended Latin alphabets. A number of other alphabets aren't written left-to-right, top-to-bottom, and I don't know to what extend Adobe's reader software can render those. It shouldn't be a problem for Cyrillic, Greek, or Hangul, though. And the request for Madarin seems like a bit of a challenge.

[Doug_Pardee Distinguished Bibliophile]

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Doug_Pardee rewrote:

I don't know to what extent Adobe's reader software can render those. It shouldn't be a problem for Cyrillic, Greek, or Hangul, though. And the request for Mandarin seems like a bit of a challenge.

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Bad day at the proofing desk for me. I got so hung up over trying to figure out whether to go with Hangul or Hangeul that I missed the nearby typos.

[alex_shin]

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Doug_Pardee wrote:

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Literally billions? There are only about 310 million people in the US, of whom it's estimated less than 15% speak (I don't know about read) a language other than English. That would be about 45 million.

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You'd be surprised, but there is a world outside United States, and in this world several billion people use non-Latin alphabets: Hindi, Mandarin, Arabic, Russian, to name a few.

If some e-reader producers were not as ignorant as they are, they could expand into these vast markets. Apparently, they, too, did not hear about the world beyond 50 states.

But even if I take your argument and limit our discussion to the US, these same 4 languages account for many millions of potential buyers. It escapes me, why nobody cares about this sector of the market.

[Doug_Pardee Distinguished Bibliophile]

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alex_shin wrote:

there is a world outside United States

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NOOK is not sold outside of the United States.

[Ya_Ya]

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alex_shin wrote:

You'd be surprised, but there is a world outside United States, and in this world several billion people use non-Latin alphabets: Hindi, Mandarin, Arabic, Russian, to name a few.

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B&N doesn't have the rights to sell content outside the US at this time.  (Well a little bit to Canada - but that's about it.)  They don't sell NOOK outside the US.

[alex_shin]

Le me clarify my point... I realize that *at this point*  BN sells NOOK in the US only. However, other big name e-reader producers (Amazon, Sony) do sell internationally already. Neither have support for non-Latin alphabets.

I do not believe it is expensive or technically complicated to add this feature. In fact, all readers being sold in China and Russia do have full support of pretty much any alphabet. There are alternative firmware versions for both Kindle and Sony (and I am sure, for NOOK too) that add this feature.

So the only roadblock, as I see it, is ignorance and short-sightedness of the marketing management, who could not care less about this potential market. 

When we discussed this subject with Michael V. after the original Nook release, he hinted that BN is working on something in this direction. Apparetly, they chose not to.

It makes me angry because I simply cannot find a quality product on the US market that would let me read in different languages, without hacking its software and invalidating the warranty.

I do like Nook more than other readers and would happily buy it, if it had this feature.

[ABthree]

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alex_shin wrote:

It makes me angry because I simply cannot find a quality product on the US market that would let me read in different languages, without hacking its software and invalidating the warranty.

I do like Nook more than other readers and would happily buy it, if it had this feature.

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Does your gasoline-powered car "make you angry" too, because it's not a hybrid?

Makes about as much sense. 

Ereaders are produced to sell eBooks.  That goes for Amazon, Sony or any other company, not just B&N.  How big is the supply of eBooks in non-Latin writing systems, anyway -- EPUBs, not PDFs with embedded fonts?  When there are hundreds of thousands of such eBooks being produced and readily available, and when your "millions" are clamoring for them -- and are willing to say it with money -- you'll be gratified to see how quickly the device makers respond.

Until then, it isn't B&N's responsibility to create a market because you'd like one.

[alex_shin]

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ABthree wrote:

> Does your gasoline-powered car "make you angry" too, because it's not a hybrid?

Makes about as much sense. 

Incorrect comparison: I can trade in my gasoline-powered car for a hybrid of my choice, but I cannot find a single model of reader with a feature I look for.

> Ereaders are produced to sell eBooks.  That goes for Amazon, Sony or any other company, not just B&N.  How big is the supply of eBooks in non-Latin writing systems, anyway -- EPUBs, not PDFs with embedded fonts? 

First of all, I WOULD buy English books too, as I do buy them on paper - from Amazon, B&N, etc. They would get my money from book sales as well - not just for a reader. I am not talking about people who would read exclusively in their native language. I just dont want to limit myself to English if I pay $100+ for a reader.

Supply of non-Latin e-books is huge - I can point you to a long list of web sites selling books in Russian, and this is probably true for any other language.

Somehow, e-reader makers in Europe or Asia do not limit their products to a single alphabet, they apparently dont think such limitation would benefit their sales in any way.

[ABthree]

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alex_shin wrote:

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Incorrect comparison: I can trade in my gasoline-powered car for a hybrid of my choice, but I cannot find a single model of reader with a feature I look for.

First of all, I WOULD buy English books too, as I do buy them on paper - from Amazon, B&N, etc. They would get my money from book sales as well - not just for a reader. I am not talking about people who would read exclusively in their native language. I just dont want to limit myself to English if I pay $100+ for a reader.

Somehow, e-reader makers in Europe or Asia do not limit their products to a single alphabet, they apparently dont think such limitation would benefit their sales in any way.

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You contradict yourself.  If "e-reader makers in Europe or Asia do not limit their products to a single alphabet", then how come "[you] cannot find a single model of reader with a feature [you] look for"?

If you're right about overseas makers, I don't understand why you aren't you just buying one of their products.  And if you're wrong, I don't understand why you'd say it, or why you're singling B&N out for all the moaning.

Unless you're mirroring all these posts on Amazon's boards, too. ;-) 

[alex_shin]

> You contradict yourself.  If "e-reader makers in Europe or Asia do not limit their products to a single alphabet", then how come "[you] cannot find a single model of reader with a feature [you] look for"?

I dont think I do. All these European/Chinese readers are not officially and widely available in the US. There are independent importers that bring some of the models, but they are few and their mark-ups are too high, not to mention the level of tech support.

I bought an old, heavy and ugly EZreader for almost $200 - only because it can display both English and Russian (along with other encodings). I would happily buy an advanced, feature-rich, light and pretty Nook for $140, if it just could do the same simple thing...

[alex_shin]

> I don't understand why you'd say it, or why you're singling B&N out for all the moaning. Unless you're mirroring all these posts on Amazon's boards, too. ;-)

No, I dont mirror them. I like Nook more than Kindle, for obvious reasons: ePUB, Adobe DRM vs. proprietory formats. And I am trying to help making this product even better, suitable for even wider audience (including myself). I am a software engineer and I understand a couple of things about technology. It is not hard to do -it's just not ot their priority list...

[AnnaKuz]

Hi - I have an android phone and by "mistake" I found out I could get extended characters, for example "variations" of a and o - å, ä and ö (which are used in my language, Swedish), by holding down the key for that letter, which would bring up a box with variations to click on. I just tested it on the NC and it works the same way. Of course most of the other keys just repeats the letter.

Play around with it and see if you can get the characters you need...

Anna

[v_west]

Regardless of non-English speaking users, this is a big problem - especially when my interests are *English* language histories of other countries and cultures.

Example - I recently paid approx $12 for "Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan," a pulitzer prize winning book sold by BN.com for the nook - it's an English book - and it's essentially unreadable.  Why?

Because places, names and words in a history of a Japanese figure require non-latin characters - which the author uses about 5-6 times per *page*.  Unacceptable for reading a history!

This is a BIG problem that could be easily fixed on a tablet that essentially runs on android - and it's deceptive to market these books when they're not readable.

The Penguin version of Ryonosuke Akutagawa's short stories is another example - sold for a similar price, and unreadable.

[jintoku]

This is an important issue. There are a number of non-Latin characters that are more or less "standard" in many English publications, especially in transliteration of other languages (such as Japanese, as mentioned upstream). It is also a bane to scholarly works that cite text in Greek or Hebrew -- not at all unusual in even popular works, let alone scholarly ones -- and while the Greek can mostly come through, accented characters of all sorts become a string of "???"

So this is not a minor flaw, but a significant issue for anything that is truly meant to be an "eReader."

Having access to one Unicode font would solve this problem.

[White_Pine]

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jintoku wrote:

This is an important issue. There are a number of non-Latin characters that are more or less "standard" in many English publications, especially in transliteration of other languages (such as Japanese, as mentioned upstream). It is also a bane to scholarly works that cite text in Greek or Hebrew -- not at all unusual in even popular works, let alone scholarly ones -- and while the Greek can mostly come through, accented characters of all sorts become a string of "???"

So this is not a minor flaw, but a significant issue for anything that is truly meant to be an "eReader."

Having access to one Unicode font would suoolve this problem.

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I have a copy of Parmenides by Martin Heidegger that is unreadable due to the Greek coming out as garbage ascii. Is this an issue that can be worked around through rooting? Or is it another collossal failure of the epub format/publishing industry, such as having to forgo footnotes and illustrations?