Aura HD For U.S. Buyers...

[Hartsock]

Tracking puts it in the local post office at 9am today which I imagine means no delivery until Tuesday.

[dordale]

jocampo--

My Sony readers do support epubs in landscape mode. But, stock from Sony the landscape mode repeats the last few lines of the ePub on the second screen. How I *think* they've programmed it is simply to take the portrait mode and enlarge it so about half of it fits on the screen as landscape. (I could be totally wrong about this.)

But I've added the PRS+ firmware to my Sonys and that added a "true landscape" mode to the reader. The text of ePubs reflows perfectly to fill the screen with no annoying overlapping. So, it's not the ePub format--just that the developers of the readers for whatever reason choose not to offer a landscape option.

[Hartsock]

I never heard of the prs+ firmware, will have to look into it. Any downside to using it on the T1?

My Aura HD arrived and I'm pretty happy.

[Nil Einne]

Originally Posted by Cdesja5

Fortunately (for us Canadians at least), Monday is a holiday in ALL of Canada

Sorry poor phrasing. But are you sure of that? From what I've read it's not really what I would call a holiday in Nova Scotia. It would still be a holiday for federal government employees which I presume includes any customs and other such agents and I guess some companies may also observe it Canada wide, but it doesn't sound that it has much legislative backing which would make it what I would call a holiday.

[Cdesja5]

Originally Posted by Nil Einne

Sorry poor phrasing. But are you sure of that? From what I've read it's not really what I would call a holiday in Nova Scotia. It would still be a holiday for federal government employees which I presume includes any customs and other such agents and I guess some companies may also observe it Canada wide, but it doesn't sound that it has much legislative backing which would make it what I would call a holiday.

In some provinces stores and some businesses are open (but not banks and government offices) but you can take another day off instead if you have to work on that day; in that respect it's like our Thanksgiving Day. It is definitely a holiday on that specific day in Ontario (pretty much everything closed even stores) where the KOBO offices are located.
Hope you hear from them today...

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Nil Einne

Sorry poor phrasing. But are you sure of that? From what I've read it's not really what I would call a holiday in Nova Scotia. It would still be a holiday for federal government employees which I presume includes any customs and other such agents and I guess some companies may also observe it Canada wide, but it doesn't sound that it has much legislative backing which would make it what I would call a holiday.

For the 4 maritime provinces, Victoria Day is a optional holiday, for the other 6 provinces and 3 territories, it is a statutory holiday. NB, NS, PEI and NL also treat Thanksgiving as an optional holiday and half of them skip Remembrance Day. Eh, what can you expect from a bunch of Easterners...

Regards,
David

[dordale]

Originally Posted by Hartsock

I never heard of the prs+ firmware, will have to look into it. Any downside to using it on the T1?

My Aura HD arrived and I'm pretty happy.

Hartsock--Unfortunately, the PRS+ firmware won't work on either the T1 or T2. Sony changed the underlying operating system from between the x50 models and the T1.

[theonna]

I'll give my Kobo order story, I have preordered on April 15th, 3 conversations with CS and 2 weeks worth of "processing"- I got shipping confirmation on May 6. CS kept telling me that there is very high demand and processing an order- is a lengthy process.
My friend placed her order on May 1st, when Aura was listed as in stock on the website, and still have not received a shipping confirmation.
As far as reader itself- it should ditch the database, and use normal file manager, would be by far more efficient and convenient. But why would anyone listen to me...

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by theonna

I'll give my Kobo order story, I have preordered on April 15th, 3 conversations with CS and 2 weeks worth of "processing"- I got shipping confirmation on May 6. CS kept telling me that there is very high demand and processing an order- is a lengthy process.
My friend placed her order on May 1st, when Aura was listed as in stock on the website, and still have not received a shipping confirmation.
As far as reader itself- it should ditch the database, and use normal file manager, would be by far more efficient and convenient. But why would anyone listen to me...

Considering the amount of information stored in the database, we would need to use a file system capable of storing a large amount of metadata in addition to the file name/size/data. At this point, I have difficulty thinking of one that has that capability and the near universal read-write availability of the FAT32 file system nor can I think of a consumer file system that is more efficient when searching and accessing stored information than a relational database.

The Mac HFS+ file system with data and resource forks or NTFS with streams are just not as universally supported as FAT32. Other possibilities suffer even more from a lack of operating system support. The only DBFS I can think of that could have reached the consumer was Microsoft's WinFS (one of the pillars of Windows Vista which vanished during the Vista reboot). There was the IBM DB2 for i which worked quite well but might be a touch difficult to port to a low power ereader. Check out Fortress Rochester by Frank G. Soltis for more on the topic.

Regards,
David

[theonna]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Considering the amount of information stored in the database, we would need to use a file system capable of storing a large amount of metadata in addition to the file name/size/data.

You are correct if you NEED all that metadata to be processed by the reader itself, unfortunately this approach yields extremely long processing times when actually trying to use reader at it's full capacity, some of us have more than a 1000 books in our collections. Also this database is highly susceptible to being corrupted and deleting items takes almost as long as adding them. Nook and Kindle do not have any of this issues.
As far as file manager support- it is the most helpful feature, especially to those of us with large collections, once organized by folders large collection is easily searched, transferred between devices and using it definitely beats a need to create hundreds of collections, especially since Kobo interface only lets you create collections manually and add books also manually one at a time, which is a total no go with a large collection of books. In short- Kobo becomes a nightmare to use for anyone with large collection of books, no matter how wonderful the screen is, if I cant find a book or have to wait for an hour after disconnecting my reader from computer...Which happens if you get close to 2gig of books on your reader, each time you disconnect from computer.
And I am not even touching a problem when you cant find any book, that is written in different language, than the default keyboard allows, even though you can read it just fine. File manager is the easiest solution for this.
Sorry for the long post.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by theonna

You are correct if you NEED all that metadata to be processed by the reader itself, unfortunately this approach yields extremely long processing times when actually trying to use reader at it's full capacity, some of us have more than a 1000 books in our collections. Also this database is highly susceptible to being corrupted and deleting items takes almost as long as adding them. Nook and Kindle do not have any of this issues.
As far as file manager support- it is the most helpful feature, especially to those of us with large collections, once organized by folders large collection is easily searched, transferred between devices and using it definitely beats a need to create hundreds of collections, especially since Kobo interface only lets you create collections manually and add books also manually one at a time, which is a total no go with a large collection of books. In short- Kobo becomes a nightmare to use for anyone with large collection of books, no matter how wonderful the screen is, if I cant find a book or have to wait for an hour after disconnecting my reader from computer...Which happens if you get close to 2gig of books on your reader, each time you disconnect from computer.
And I am not even touching a problem when you cant find any book, that is written in different language, than the default keyboard allows, even though you can read it just fine. File manager is the easiest solution for this.
Sorry for the long post.

Sorry but this does not lead to long processing time. When I did a factory reset on my Aura after trying to duplicate a bug involving turning the light on while playing solitaire, it took 6 minutes to process 1600 books (~1.4GB). As for the disconnection time? You only need to process new books. So unless you routinely load 2 gigs of new books every time you connect...

As for creating collections aka shelves? Again, Calibre does an excellent job of that. For the most part, I don't bother. Author, series or book title fragment in search works quite well for locating books. Want to locate a book in the Prince Roger series? rog in the search bar. Care to locate the Belisarius series? beli in the search bar -- actually bel works but also pops up David Edding's Belgariad series. Tap on Belisarius and see all 6 books in the series. Total elapsed time from tapping the search bar on the home page, tapping on library since the search bar on the home page defaults to bookstore, type in 3-4 letters, 1 to 3 taps to select a book was less than 5 seconds.

And I have close to 8 thousand books on my computer, some of which I know I will never read again but why have 5TB of local storage if you can't keep old files around? I use Calibre to manage that collection just ensuring I edit the author name/author sort to allow keeping books together. Considering that the H. Beam Piper books I own have come with H B Piper, H. B. Piper, H. Beam Piper. H Beam Piper and Henry Beam Piper as the author name, Calibre makes it easy to modify the metadata to have all of them as author: H. Beam Piper and author sort as Piper, H. Beam

Deleting items doesn't seem to take all that long to me. But then I only delete one at a time from the Kobo UI. For mass deletions, I generally use Calibre. For really mass deletions, SD Formatter works like a charm.

Searching for a book using the Kobo search bar seems quite speedy. It took less than a second to return A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court when I typed conn in the search bar. Typing in 'webe' to locate books by David Weber returned David Weber as the only search return before I got my finger off the keyboard from typing the 2nd e. Of course, I then had to scroll through the 8 pages of books by David Weber to see all of them.

Had I been looking for a specific book, say The Apocalypse Troll, typing ap brought that up as the second item on the search list while 'apo' made it one of three choices (The Apocalypse Troll, Napoleon the Little and The Ultimate Weapon).

Going to my computer and trying to find a book in the collection there took longer either boring down through the directory structure or doing a search on the root directory.

As for finding a book in a different language? The only issues I've had were with Cyrillic books. Locating them in the library isn't all that hard since I did go to the trouble of setting the author/author sort and book title in latin characters. Again bulk edits of metadata makes life much easier. Since the Kobo ereader is Linux based, adding more languages should not be that major a task.

As for needing all that metadata? Depends on how you define need. Personally, I find much of it useful and would like to keep that information around. Trivia such as where I am in reading multiple books, font, font size, margin and line spacing selected for the book when I last had it open, when was I last reading that book, etc.

Personally, I tend to feel that a file browser might be handy but compared to a decent search function? I'll take the search function every time..

Regards,
David

[theonna]

Originally Posted by DNSB

As for creating collections aka shelves? Again, Calibre does an excellent job of that. For the most part, I don't bother. [skipped]
As for finding a book in a different language? The only issues I've had were with Cyrillic books.

It took Calibre 15min to delete 3000 books, it took Calibre 40 min to process 3000 books, another 40+ to put them on the device, it took Aurora another 30+ min after all that to process those books and actually become useable. And this is after Calibre supposedly already created database. Problem besides time is that Kobo did not even care to create anything to automate managing shelves or libraries for their device, people must rely on Calibre for that functionality.
As far as book search- english is fine, it is those pesky other languages, Chinese, Hindu, Cyrillic that you wont be able to find, of course if you are "power" user you'd used Calibre or something else to transliterate meta information for your books, but just imagine how faster it would have been if you did not need Calibre, just put your folder organized collection on the device and you are ready to go.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by theonna

It took Calibre 15min to delete 3000 books, it took Calibre 40 min to process 3000 books, another 40+ to put them on the device, it took Aurora another 30+ min after all that to process those books and actually become useable. And this is after Calibre supposedly already created database.

Yes, it takes time to delete the books through calibre. It is removing stuff from the database and deleting the books and cover images. And it takes time to send the books to the device. And then it takes time for the device to process the books. The only error you have is that calibre does not add the books to the database when sending the books. That is left to the device.

Now that it all clean and the books are on the device, how long does it take to add ten books?

Problem besides time is that Kobo did not even care to create anything to automate managing shelves or libraries for their device, people must rely on Calibre for that functionality.

That is correct. They have their own application to put books on the device. Unfortunately, they didn't add the function there.

As far as book search- english is fine, it is those pesky other languages, Chinese, Hindu, Cyrillic that you wont be able to find, of course if you are "power" user you'd used Calibre or something else to transliterate meta information for your books, but just imagine how faster it would have been if you did not need Calibre, just put your folder organized collection on the device and you are ready to go.

I find the search works well. And well enough I am not spending as much time on the shelves as I did. But, I can't really comment on non-English search other than to say I haven't seen many complaints before. Because of that, I assume it was OK. Are you using English as the interface language, or the language you are searching in? That might be the difference.

And I have to say it:

It sound like you bought the wrong device. From everything you say, the Kobo devices are not for you. Not having a file browser is well known and even a tiny bit of research would have shown this. And the one thing I am completely sure about future firmware, is that it won't have a file browser. Kobo will fix some things and break others. They will add some things we like and some things we hate. Same with removing function. But, I would be stunned if they added file browser.

The language support is a bit different. As I commented above, my impression is that it isn't bad, but, I only speak English (though my wife might not agree). Anything I know about other language support is from comments here. Finding information on it would have been a bit harder. Of course, I don't think Kobo make any claim to support the languages you mention. They do support Japanese, I probably thought that would flow to these languages as well.

Of course, there is no reason you should not ask for these extra functions. But, don't be surprised when Kobo never give you the file browser. Better language support is probably on the cards, though I have no idea when.

[samhy]

Originally Posted by davidfor

I find the search works well. And well enough I am not spending as much time on the shelves as I did. But, I can't really comment on non-English search other than to say I haven't seen many complaints before. Because of that, I assume it was OK. Are you using English as the interface language, or the language you are searching in? That might be the difference.

Originally Posted by davidfor

The language support is a bit different. As I commented above, my impression is that it isn't bad, but, I only speak English (though my wife might not agree). Anything I know about other language support is from comments here. Finding information on it would have been a bit harder. Of course, I don't think Kobo make any claim to support the languages you mention. They do support Japanese, I probably thought that would flow to these languages as well.

Very good points.
The Japanese support was one of the reasons why I chose Kobo in the first place. When the interface is set to Japanese, it's a breeze to search in Japanese since the input can be either in Japanese or roman alphabet. I can't speak for languages other than English, French, Spanish and Japanese, though.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by theonna

It took Calibre 15min to delete 3000 books, it took Calibre 40 min to process 3000 books, another 40+ to put them on the device, it took Aurora another 30+ min after all that to process those books and actually become useable. And this is after Calibre supposedly already created database. Problem besides time is that Kobo did not even care to create anything to automate managing shelves or libraries for their device, people must rely on Calibre for that functionality.

Calibre does not put the books into the database, the Kobo does that. See the comments about needing two passes to do some tasks. As for your times, hmmm... 0.3 seconds per book to delete them which includes updating the Calibre database. 40 minutes to process 3000 books by which I'm going to think you mean adding them to Calibre, 40+ minutes to transfer them to the Kobo -- that is ridiculously slow. As for the shelf management, I seldom use it since search works so well. And the vast majority of readers do not add 3000 books at a time. Heck, most of them will not read that many books in the lifetime of their ereader.

Originally Posted by theonna

As far as book search- english is fine, it is those pesky other languages, Chinese, Hindu, Cyrillic that you wont be able to find, of course if you are "power" user you'd used Calibre or something else to transliterate meta information for your books, but just imagine how faster it would have been if you did not need Calibre, just put your folder organized collection on the device and you are ready to go.

Considering that Kobo does not as yet support any of those three languages, you might have been better to look for a device that supported your desired languages and had file browser support. Even if you put your collection on the Kobo neatly organized in directories and subdirectories which you can do since your Kobo does not care how the files are organized, if you are not using directory names and file names that the Kobo can display, you are not going to able to do much in any event.

Regards,
David