Thread: Wanted features
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Old 04-18-2010, 08:30 AM   #36
fjtorres
Grand Sorcerer
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Posts: 11,732
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Join Date: May 2009
Location: 26 kly from Sgr A*
Device: T100TA,PW2,PRS-T1,KT,FireHD 8.9,K2, PB360,BeBook One,Axim51v,TC1000
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marcy View Post
MS Reader has been all but abandoned by Microsoft—there hasn't been an update in almost 3 years, which is forever in software terms.
Quite true.
But two minor points and I'll move on:

1- LIT isn't *quite* dead yet. Yes, it is currently fading into the legacy format category but... MS released an MS Reader update us a couple of months ago amid a flood of rumors that they might be adding it to Zune HD and WinMo 7 phones. And then, to add fuel to the fire, the various videos floating around of Microsoft's dual-lcd journal prototype, the Courier, show one of its functions is... ebooks. Finally, *many* of the ebook pundits talking of the things they saw under NDA at CES 2010 were saying the same thing: don't count Microsoft out yet. It is still early in the ebook gae and MS has some leverage to work with if they choose to take MS Reader to version 3 and run it on Zune HD, WinMo 7 phones, and the wave of upcoming Win7 Atom slates. Today, it's a legacy format. Tomorrow it might be dead. Or it might be a contender.

2- Conversion can be done, yes. And Calibre in particular is very fast converting LIT to ePub which is, clearly, the Pocketbook's preferred format, even under FBReader. However... while conversion doesn't alter the text in the file, conversion *does* alter the internal links and structures of the ebook. And Calibre's ePub conversion, because of the immature state of the ePub spec, which is loose and has tons of room for interpretation, is strongly biased towards Adobe's interpretation on Sony readers. This leads to issues with the output ePubs showing erratic behavior in other reader or cataloging apps. On Pocketbook, for example, we have the ongoing issue of covers not always displaying in the bookshelf. Other issues I've heard of are of weird hard-wired margins and font sizes, links that don't always work the way they're supposed to, etc. And these are all things that work okay in ADE so the baseline assumption is to blame the file or the conversion code instead of wondering if maybe ADE is at fault. Give it a while and this can come back to haunt the industry big time. My take on conversion is that it is not something to be avoided at all costs, like format conversion of digital music files which requires transcoding and is guaranteed to degrade quality, but it *is* something to be avoided whenever possible; if I have a book in Mobi format, I'll read it in that format even if it means run-on chapters or erratic TOC recogition by FBReader. Ditto for rtf or Html. Unlike many out there, I do not see it as a given that ePub is the end-all, be-all of ebook formats, much less the Adobe-specific ePub that Calibre tries to output.

If nothing else it is worth remembering that the publishers store their ebooks in their back-end servers in OEB format, not ePub. Last I heard, ePub-ing is done on the retail servers not at the publishing house. Nothing stops the publishers from switching their "industry-standard" label to something else.

With that in mind, I favor ebook readers that let me read my accumulated content in its native file format as much as possible; I don't demand support for every last obscure format out there as I don't use it. But support for formats with significant commercial ebook history such as Mobi, LIT, and PDB is a *nice* feature to have. I might even be suggesting eReader support along with it were it not for the fact that my exposure to the issue on the Aztak/Hanlin forums has made it clear it can't be done without B&N suport and B&N is not particularly interested in helping Aztak and co. Much less Pocketbook Global.

Ultimately its not about the format but rather about the books themselves. Being able to access them with a minimum of muss or fuss.

Hence my request for LIT support.
I love my PB360 a lot. Lack of LIT support isn't going to change that. But adding it would make my whole month...

Last edited by fjtorres; 04-18-2010 at 08:37 AM.
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