Register Guidelines E-Books Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read

Go Back   MobileRead Forums > E-Book Readers > Kobo Reader

Notices

Reply
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread
Old 10-22-2010, 11:58 PM   #16
SameerH
Product Manager
SameerH ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.SameerH ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.SameerH ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.SameerH ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.SameerH ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.SameerH ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.SameerH ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.SameerH ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.SameerH ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.SameerH ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.SameerH ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
SameerH's Avatar
 
Posts: 487
Karma: 590887
Join Date: May 2010
Location: Toronto
Device: Kobo Aura H2O
Quote:
Originally Posted by dos View Post
Very true. I wouldn't expect ePubs purchased/otherwise obtained from sources that aren't official Kobo (Borders, the Kobo store etc) to look good right off the bat.

It would be nice if there was some QC on Kobo's part to make sure things from their own stores looked good on their own device though, especially since they are DRMed and you have to (maybe, ianal) break the law in order to reformat them.

Not to mention the average user would have absolutely no idea how to find the tools necessary to break DRM and probably doesn't even know that the appearance of the books can be changed. Those folks are just going to say "welp, this thing sucks, look at how bad the books look" and return it for a Kindle or whatever, this is bad for Kobo and bad for us, fans of the Kobo who want to see it succeed and become popular so we can have more nice things from them, and they can have more money to spend on development.
Excellent point on the QC. We do what we can. We routinely load very large volumes (pun intended) of books into our inventory.

While we try to get to as many as possible for good ol' eyeball QC, we have to resort to automated methods of ensuring the books are well-formed and capable of being displayed correctly on the multitude of platforms that we support of all different shapes and sizes.

I don't *think* there's much we can do about the Adobe DRM'd ePubs (except ask the publisher nicely to make some changes), but if you ever see a kobo-formatted book which is malformed in any way, send us an email and we'll get it fixed.
SameerH is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-23-2010, 12:16 AM   #17
dos
Enthusiast
dos can teach chickens to fly.dos can teach chickens to fly.dos can teach chickens to fly.dos can teach chickens to fly.dos can teach chickens to fly.dos can teach chickens to fly.dos can teach chickens to fly.dos can teach chickens to fly.dos can teach chickens to fly.dos can teach chickens to fly.dos can teach chickens to fly.
 
Posts: 36
Karma: 3982
Join Date: Oct 2010
Device: Kobo
Quote:
Originally Posted by SameerH View Post
Excellent point on the QC. We do what we can. We routinely load very large volumes (pun intended) of books into our inventory.

While we try to get to as many as possible for good ol' eyeball QC, we have to resort to automated methods of ensuring the books are well-formed and capable of being displayed correctly on the multitude of platforms that we support of all different shapes and sizes.

I don't *think* there's much we can do about the Adobe DRM'd ePubs (except ask the publisher nicely to make some changes), but if you ever see a kobo-formatted book which is malformed in any way, send us an email and we'll get it fixed.
Aside from the well known problem with images not displaying, the Kobo format books display very nicely in my opinion (one of the reasons I prefer using it). ePubs on the other hand have the major problem of having very large margins. Every ePub I've seen from the Kobo stores has this problem. Is there something preventing Kobo from running it through Calibre or something similar before putting it on the store?

Really all you need to do is go into Calibre, choose convert, select page setup, select Kobo as output and Default Input Profile as input and run the job, and it fixes it. Now I know absolutely nothing about the agreements you have with publishers regarding what you can do with their material so this may be out of the question... but I really don't see why it should be and honestly the publisher probably wouldn't even notice.

EDIT: Thanks for the reply, I know I'm a harsh critic but it's because I really do like your device and the Kobo way/philosophy. Really it's worlds better than anything else out there. But I'm going to continue to be harsh, because hey, the market is harsh

Last edited by dos; 10-23-2010 at 12:18 AM.
dos is offline   Reply With Quote
Advert
Old 10-23-2010, 03:28 PM   #18
SameerH
Product Manager
SameerH ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.SameerH ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.SameerH ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.SameerH ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.SameerH ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.SameerH ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.SameerH ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.SameerH ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.SameerH ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.SameerH ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.SameerH ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
SameerH's Avatar
 
Posts: 487
Karma: 590887
Join Date: May 2010
Location: Toronto
Device: Kobo Aura H2O
Quote:
Originally Posted by dos View Post
Aside from the well known problem with images not displaying, the Kobo format books display very nicely in my opinion (one of the reasons I prefer using it). ePubs on the other hand have the major problem of having very large margins. Every ePub I've seen from the Kobo stores has this problem. Is there something preventing Kobo from running it through Calibre or something similar before putting it on the store?
Hmm.. I'll float this up to the content development team.

Quote:
Really all you need to do is go into Calibre, choose convert, select page setup, select Kobo as output and Default Input Profile as input and run the job, and it fixes it. Now I know absolutely nothing about the agreements you have with publishers regarding what you can do with their material so this may be out of the question... but I really don't see why it should be and honestly the publisher probably wouldn't even notice.
Sadly, I don't know too much about that area either, I'm almost perpetually in the throes of some kind of launch or another on the product development side. Although I've heard that we have cool cats in flashy suits and designer sunglasses chatting up publishers over martinis and cutting awesome content deals for our customers. Perhaps they will know.

Quote:
EDIT: Thanks for the reply, I know I'm a harsh critic but it's because I really do like your device and the Kobo way/philosophy. Really it's worlds better than anything else out there. But I'm going to continue to be harsh, because hey, the market is harsh
Helps keep us in line, and makes us better. Keep it coming, this is why we love mobile read.
SameerH is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-23-2010, 05:55 PM   #19
ltr
Addict
ltr writes prose that makes the Gods weep.ltr writes prose that makes the Gods weep.ltr writes prose that makes the Gods weep.ltr writes prose that makes the Gods weep.ltr writes prose that makes the Gods weep.ltr writes prose that makes the Gods weep.ltr writes prose that makes the Gods weep.ltr writes prose that makes the Gods weep.ltr writes prose that makes the Gods weep.ltr writes prose that makes the Gods weep.ltr writes prose that makes the Gods weep.
 
Posts: 399
Karma: 104628
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Canada
Device: Kindle PW-2
Quote:
Originally Posted by SameerH View Post
........ this is why we love mobile read.
Makes me wonder why there isn't a link to this forum on the Kobo web site...
ltr is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-23-2010, 10:24 PM   #20
JPenguin
Connoisseur
JPenguin began at the beginning.
 
Posts: 90
Karma: 42
Join Date: May 2010
Location: Toronto
Device: Kobo EReader, Kobo for Palm Pre
It would probably be due to support, the scripts that the outsourced tech support people read would have a lot of trouble keeping up with MobileRead. Outsourced tech support aren't going to be able to help anyone who runs into problems with performing a SD card upgrade for example.
JPenguin is offline   Reply With Quote
Advert
Old 10-24-2010, 02:16 AM   #21
taming
Trying for calm & polite
taming ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.taming ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.taming ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.taming ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.taming ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.taming ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.taming ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.taming ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.taming ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.taming ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.taming ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
taming's Avatar
 
Posts: 4,012
Karma: 9455193
Join Date: May 2010
Location: Mostly in Canada
Device: kobo original, WiFI, Touch, Glo, and Aura
Quote:
Originally Posted by dos View Post
Really all you need to do is go into Calibre, choose convert, select page setup, select Kobo as output and Default Input Profile as input and run the job, and it fixes it.
I wonder if the display size a person uses has something to do with how much margin they want to see. I use medium text display, and the margins (in most books) amount to about 5 characters in width. I'm fine with that. When I go smaller, the margins are the same size, but then would allow several more extra words per line if made smaller. I can see that people who read print too small for my old eyes would think the margins are overly large when I would not.
taming is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search

Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
New Calibre Kobo Driver allows deleting of Kobo Free books timlegge Kobo Reader 46 08-27-2011 10:16 PM
Over trying to manage Kobo reader with Kobo desktop. Some help with Calibre? digital_steve Calibre 14 09-18-2010 01:12 AM
Over trying to manage Kobo reader with Kobo desktop. Some help with Calibre? digital_steve Kobo Reader 11 08-02-2010 10:31 PM
Calibre support for the Kobo e-reader jcornet Calibre 25 05-09-2010 04:51 AM
Thanking you all very much Novasea Sony Reader 9 09-28-2008 05:37 AM


All times are GMT -4. The time now is 05:09 AM.


MobileRead.com is a privately owned, operated and funded community.