Monday 13 January 2014

Kobo Japanese ebook


I have purchased what I took to be an updated version of Kenneth Yasuda's old book on haiku at kobobooks.

Ahem. The book proved to be Adobe DRM as a download from Kobo, but regardless, even in the Kobo Desktop Reader the book was nothing new and certainly not "e" in any sense.

The worst flaw in my view is that this Tuttle re-edition has no Japanese to accompany the 31 haiku appended to the 1950's text.

In 2014 one might have expected to see not only Unicode Japanese kanji and kana but also links to alternative translations.

At least with a paperbound edition I might pencil in some kanji and hiragana.

And then there are the typo's in the text.

And yes, Tuttle is not WhiteRabbit or Kodansha, but this text lacks even rōmaji for those selected haiku.

Worse yet : in the Kobo Desktop Reader, the pagination allows poems to be split across pages. How's that for the importance of 'cutting' at a word in hokku ?

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