Life In 19x19

I recently made a blog post which I thought might be interesting to some of you, because of the part at the end about my work on Kindle Goban. I know iPads are all the rage these days, and for good reason, but I still think things like the Kindle have a role to play, which is why I worked on this.

Anyway, it's all in the blog post, but here's an image:

Nice work.

I requested a beta invite for the KDK, but amazon couldn't even be bothered replying to my request (nevermind granting my request). It's just as well, considering it looks like you've done a fine job there and saved me the trouble.

It looks really nice.

Fantastic! I have been the owner of a Kindle DX for about a year now, and this is exciting to hear about.

From the sound of it, once applications are available it could potentially make possible the publishing of 'Books' like Bruce Wilcox's Go Dojo series via Kindle.

Considering the royalty rates publishing digitally through Amazon at the moment (70% to the author) and broader/cheaper possibilities for the distribution of niche books via Amazon/Kindle this could have some SERIOUS potential.

I too have a DX and am interested in this. I have tried to convert SGF to PDF, one move per page but the results have been unsatisfactory. The tool I used, SmartGo, does not include comments. Combined with the time to do the conversion, I decided that it was not worth it.

This seems perfect for the Kindle - big enough screen, portable and no need for lots of processing power.

But how hard is it to extract the SGF out of the Reader? A Go book could then end up as an pirate SGF-download in the internet and I do not think a Go book publisher would want to take that risk.

SpongeBob wrote:But how hard is it to extract the SGF out of the Reader? A Go book could then end up as an pirate SGF-download in the internet and I do not think a Go book publisher would want to take that risk.

I can make it arbitrarily hard within the app; the book can be encrypted if need be, as regular Kindle books are.

I don't think that's necessary though. Current paid-for Go materials (books, videos, commented SGFs, etc) are completely pirate-able (and if you know where to look, they certainly are being pirated) but it seems there's still enough paying customers to keep it afloat... though not exactly thriving

Adrian Petrescu wrote:I don't think that's necessary though. Current paid-for Go materials (books, videos, commented SGFs, etc) are completely pirate-able (and if you know where to look, they certainly are being pirated) but it seems there's still enough paying customers to keep it afloat... though not exactly thriving

Easier and cheaper access makes piracy a lot less appealing. This would certainly apply unless publishers decided to be greedy about the pricing.

This project looks outstanding! Will the application work on all Kindles?

Peter Hansmeier wrote:This project looks outstanding! Will the application work on all Kindles?

Thanks Yes, it should work on all Kindles that Amazon pushes the 2.5 software update to; at the moment that looks like it will be both the Kindle 2 and Kindle DX, although I've only found people with Kindle DXs to test on. It looks good on the Kindle 2 in the simulator though

I will post some more screenshots of different things it can do in the simulator on both Kindle 2 and DX later this week.

Sorry for the topic res, but this is awesome -- might make me upgrade my K1 when the time comes.
Any chance of a tsumego app like uliGo?

I do have content... I converted the Cho Chikun's Encyclopedia of L&D books from http://tsumego.tasuki.org to Kindle (mobi) format. They are all images, and very big files (I will look into doing more ImageMagick and reducing the file sizes).

Does anyone know if these PDFs work on the K2, K3, and DX? The problems are not images and may require special fonts not available on kindle (?).

EoL&D Vol 1 (mobi) (10 MiB)
EoL&D Vol 2 (mobi) (9.5 MiB)
EoL&D Vol 3 (mobi) (8.8 MiB)

Any news about KindleGoban?

Best regards
Gianluca

You did a nice job.

malweth wrote:Sorry for the topic res, but this is awesome -- might make me upgrade my K1 when the time comes.
Any chance of a tsumego app like uliGo?

I do have content... I converted the Cho Chikun's Encyclopedia of L&D books from http://tsumego.tasuki.org to Kindle (mobi) format. They are all images, and very big files (I will look into doing more ImageMagick and reducing the file sizes).

Does anyone know if these PDFs work on the K2, K3, and DX? The problems are not images and may require special fonts not available on kindle (?).

EoL&D Vol 1 (mobi) (10 MiB)
EoL&D Vol 2 (mobi) (9.5 MiB)
EoL&D Vol 3 (mobi) (8.8 MiB)

I put these in https://www.box.com/s/52dfe79accce1b251fd0. I don't have my own web site any longer as I've switched to Google Apps for my domains and no longer have any need to maintain a web server.

Any thoughts of making a version for Android and/or Kindle Fire tablets? I would dearly love to have an Sgt reader for my Fire.

Also would your current program work on a Kindle Touch?