I was really happy with Kobo until...

[dos]

Also, taming, you and Pookysgirl jumped on me right after my OP and started harshing me right away.

I honestly thought that was kind of rude but didn't want to start a flame war so I ignored it. It's just the internet after all.

EDIT: Also I can see what your awesome, chill relationship with Kobo has gotten us... a product full of weird bugs that nobody is bothering to fix because they assume everything's A-OK with the bucolic customer base.

"Just look at how much they love us on the forums, we don't even have to try!" *laughs all the way to the bank*

Sorry guys, I'm done here. this whole thing has been really weird. Enjoy your echo chamber. Sorry for having the gall to say Australia's selection of eBook readers might not be as varied compared to some other regions. I understand how incredibly insulting that notion is and I should have been more culturally sensitive.

EDIT2: Also lol at how somebody meekly voiced their own dissatisfaction with the same problem and you instantly assume it's a sock puppet

[taming]

( never mind, dos made a decision that made my last post about checking to be sure he was running 1.4 moot)

[viviena]

EDIT: Also I can see what your awesome, chill relationship with Kobo has gotten us... a product full of weird bugs that nobody is bothering to fix because they assume everything's A-OK with the bucolic customer base.

We've already had one majorly weird bug fixed thanks to community involvement. Other issues have been addressed too. What makes you think the comments voiced here are suddenly falling on deafened ears, or even that nobody here sees any merit in your points? Is it because not all of the posts in this one thread happened to agree with you?

I actually liked some of your points too. The native Kobo format also seems inadequate to me and can be much improved. It's a pity you decided to flounce and ragequit, patronisingly calling all of us whipped in the process.

[zoran]

Originally Posted by dos

EDIT2: Also lol at how somebody meekly voiced their own dissatisfaction with the same problem and you instantly assume it's a sock puppet

Have to admit that I went to wiki to find the meaning of the idiom.
However, when I let time go, I found that a lot of features I wanted
to have on the reader meant nothing in a long period. Why should
I have book cover when power down at all? Some other people are
not happy without go-to-page and removal from "currently reading".
I'm one book at a time reader and I read from cover to cover. So, it
is not meekly, but I know what I don't need. In fact, there is a chance
I will not upgrade to 1.5 at all.
I agree that forum is silent from time to time. The number of posters
is smaller compared to kindle one. It depicts the number of customers
for both products. And the income of both enterprises.
Best regards.

[timlegge]

Originally Posted by taming

Tim, it is the Kobo format that is used for all the sync operations with mobile apps, the website, and soon the WiFi reader. My assumption has been that this proprietary DRM scheme is in place because they can't use ADE with them.

I know what it does. I just can't figure out why it is used :-). I had assumed that it made sense because it could be used with the other mobile devices. Since the latest iPhone app uses ePub format my theory that the format allowed consistency between platforms is shot down.

Originally Posted by taming

It's interesting that Sony has its new generation of readers still tied to the desktop and ADE. No WiFi--though they have touch. Sony is supposed to have some apps coming up, so they too will have to figure out how to make a non-ADE drm format correctly.

Kobo has clearly figured out how to deliver epubs to the apple devices and keep them encrypted.

Originally Posted by taming

Does this make any kind of sense?

Not really, given the issues with graphics (which are prevalent in sci-fi and fantasy and other genres) there does not seem to be a good reason to maintain a second format. I suppose they may run the publisher formats through something to allow it to fit the device better...

Originally Posted by taming

I'm really hoping that improving the Kobo sync formatting is one of the things they have been working on, but Kobo doesn't tell us much about their future plans. I can understand why they might not want to release this kind of information, but sheesh, inquiring minds definitely want to know

Yes, they do...

Tim

[taming]

The Android App for Kobo is also (IMO) better than the desktop syncing with the reader. I didn't have anything with illustrations to try, but the pagination is better and there is a slider that lets you more easily find a specific page and go there. From what I understand that Android App is not nearly as good as the iPad/iPhone one, which was just updated.

Maybe we will see an improvement on the original with the update, or on the WiFi version. I guess time will tell.

[corona]

Originally Posted by karunaji

To make it official I now tell how appalled I am with the current state of e-book format rendering.

Very tempting to quote your entire post, and your umbrage, karunjai, is IMO very valid. And I totally agree with you that if publishers wanted to fix these problems, they could.

At the same time, there are plenty of parallels in other digital media. There's the abysmal quality of a lot of MP3 audio, and the really embarrassing failings of "HD" digital cable TV whenever anything in the scene has the audacity to move.

Crappy proofreading doesn't save bandwidth, fair enough. (Although lots of MP3 audio could be way better, too, without using more precious, pricey kilobytes.) But it is similar in that, when you get down to it, most consumers either don't notice or don't care.

Edit: Sorry, dos, if you're still here, that I'm kind of off-topic. Kind of. My comments apply, I think, to buggy formats as well. But do you have to be so touchy?

[sabredog]

Originally Posted by dos

Perhaps I have something in ADE mis-configured and this is causing the strange margin problems. I suspect, however that this is a problem with the way the Kobo reader handles the ePubs purchased on the Kobo store, as they display fine in ADE and the margin error only appears when loaded onto the reader.

Perhaps that might be the case. However bad formatting of ePUB's is nothing new. I often wonder if publishers actually proof ebooks before they place them for sale.

[karunaji]

Originally Posted by sabredog

I often wonder if publishers actually proof ebooks before they place them for sale.

Not sure about current state of affairs but some years ago I actually had a job as a Latvian proofreader in the publishing house. The first rule in my job was that all proofreading is done on paper printouts only. The reason is very obvious – it is hard to read on the screen and you miss about 50% of mistakes when reading a text on the screen. You work with a red pen and another person enters all corrections into a file and he will miss about 1-2% corrections. Then it is double-checked and when all corrections are entered, the book is printed again for a second proofreading.

Such meticulous proofreading usually is not done for publications that are for web only. The readers don't notice most mistakes when reading on the screen anyway. It is not a big surprise that e-books didn't gain popularity until the appearance of e-ink technology. The quality of the screens simply wasn't good enough.

E-ink, although not as good as paper yet, however, is quite comfortable for eyes and readers start noticing typos they missed when reading on the computer. It makes impression that the quality is going down but probably such mistakes were there all along on the web but most people didn't care. If an e-book is proofread on the LCD screen, then a reader on an e-ink device is going to notice a lot of mistakes. iPad users will probably be less critical and like their books better.

My proposal is that publishers (companies or self-publishing authors) should proofread on an actual e-ink screen. Vendors could provide necessary tools and software to make it easier for proofreaders and discourage submitting ebook format before this step is duly completed.

[taming]

I had to laugh (or cry) when an eBook I paid $12 for had, as one of its first pages, that warning about what it means if you are buying a book with a missing front cover--you know the one that says that it is a book that was supposed to be destroyed because it did not sell and the bookstore/vendor got their money back from the publisher.

[JCKobo]

Originally Posted by timlegge

It would surprise me a great deal if the data sent to the kobo is different than that sent to the iPhone app (it does not make sense to maintain three copies of the book (ePub, Kobo sqlite and iPhone sqlite)) so I suspect that there is a bug in the reader.

The iPhone gets almost the same ePub as our other devices - the only difference being we ship an iPhone specific CSS file with it. The SQLite format only exists on our Desktop and on the original Kobo Reader.

Guess which are in my sights to change next?