I’ve gotten a lot of value out of Humble Bundle’s ebook bundles, which have let me cheaply amass a library of good books and comics that it’ll take me ages to get through. But I do have a few minor complaints…
- It feels like I spend more time fixing up metadata than actually reading them. Books tend to be okay, but the comics are usually missing metadata entirely aside from the title, which is in a compressed format like “dropsofgodvol12.pdf”. Calibre at least has some tools to let you batch convert titles like that into a more reasonable form, but then I still have to fill in the author, artists, genre, etc.
- You can get the books in various formats, but often it’ll present a choice between like a 150 MB PDF, a 254 MB EPUB, and a 18 MB CBZ. Is there a significant quality difference between them? I typically would grab the CBZ for comics, but this CBZ is suspiciously small, so is it very poor quality? Sometimes the bigger file is the higher-quality one, but sometimes it’s just unnecessarily bloated, too. The only way to be sure is to download them all and compare, and which one is best is often different from book to book.
- The ‘batch downloader’ is kind of a joke since it just automatically kicks off an avalanche of individual downloads, which causes a flood of popups to confirm the save location. Some of them inevitably fail to download properly, so I still have to go through manually and verify and redownload them. There’s a bittorrent option, but it’s still a separate torrent file for each book that you have to download.
Some of this might just be my urge to keep things organized, and it’s definitely still worth it to get the bundles, though.