My new Kobo

[dvd8n]

Well, after my Sony started to get a bit cranky I looked around for a replacement and settled on a Kobo Aura HD.

Hardware wise, the Kobo is great. However, as a software professional, I feel qualified to declare that the software is a total POS (industry term).

The pain started on booting the device and discovering that I couldn't even start it up without connecting to the internet and creating a Kobo account. Ok, not the end of the world, I suppose. It did mean that all the software got updated to the latest version though.

I sent a few books to the Kobo using Calibre and it looked great. Ok, the book reading software makes the unaccountable decision to leave a large portion of the page blank occasionally, but OK.

So I added a large section of my collection to the Kobo using Calibre; about 1000 books. That went pretty quickly - much quicker than the Sony, so I was quite pleased. Little did I know....

The Kobo sat for the rest of the day 'processing new content'. The rest of the day! What is it doing? And what incompetent wrote this code? The rest of the day!!!!!!!!!!! How can that be acceptable?

So when I added the rest I did it in the evening so that It could process the content overnight. Ridiculous!

So, I decide to read a book. Into the library. And what do I see? Six books to the page. My collection stretches to almost six hundred pages! And no way of scrolling through the library other than one page at a time. Really? One page at a time? I guess my Xena Warrior Princess novelizations aren't going to get read too often then!

Maybe collections will help, then. I use the instructions here to set up Calibre to create them. I deleted all the content on the Kobo so that I could start clean, and sent a few of the books to the Kobo again. Overnight, obviously. I had a look at my collections. Hmmmm. This could work.

So I sent my whole collection to the Kobo. Overnight again. The following morning .............. the Kobo had hung. After much faffing about I decided that the new content processing was taking so long that it was actually flattening the battery before it finished. It would only process the content with the device connected to mains power.

So the collections were really good, right? Nope. I think I have too many collections. Turns out that the collections will only display if you select the menu option, wait for ten minutes, try to turn the thing off until the turn off suceeds then turn it on again. Outstanding stuff, Kobo! You can then see the collections! And what do you see? Ten to a page and the only way that you can page through them is to flick forward one page at a time. Not that again! But I've got sixty pages of them! That's Roger Zelazny not going to get read then.

Ok, I'll have a look at reading CBRs now. I copy a whole load onto an SD card and plug it in. 'Processing New Content'. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

Open up the library and pick a CBR. Not the best CBR reader, but not the worst either. Ok. Read another. And another. And I run into the library clunkiness again. So I try the Search functionality instead. That works well - till I want to read the ninth book in the series. And what do I find? I find that the search results show eight to a page - and there's no way to page forward to the ninth result onwards. Really? Really?????

Ok, I can work around this. I'll delete the CBRs that I've read. That stops me trying to re-read stuff too. Ok - I'm actually fine with this. Till it hangs on delete. Turns out the thing hangs on about one delete in six. The only way to get it going again is to reset it with a pin in the reset hole.
I can only assume that the software testing and useability testing was only done with a small number of books on the device. This really isn't good enough, Kobo. Not good enough at all.

[tempest@de]

Maybe this is a dumb question but couldn't you just swipe the screen to pass the page and get to the 9th book?
I don't have an aura, I have a glo and when I do a search I can move between pages to get to the book I'm looking.
I don't know if you tried it but you can advance to a specific page in the collections, It is not ideal but it helps, for example if you have the books ordered by author and the same author has 25 books and you want the 25th, instead of swipe the screen 4 times you can just enter the page number 5 and it will go the last books, off course this only works if the books are listed in the series order which not always happens, I think if you use the plugboards it will but I'm not sure.

[dvd8n]

Originally Posted by tempest@de

Maybe this is a dumb question but couldn't you just swipe the screen to pass the page and get to the 9th book?

Swiping has absolutely no effect.

Originally Posted by tempest@de

I don't have an aura, I have a glo and when I do a search I can move between pages to get to the book I'm looking.

How? Is it by hard buttons?

Originally Posted by tempest@de

I don't know if you tried it but you can advance to a specific page in the collections, It is not ideal but it helps, for example if you have the books ordered by author and the same author has 25 books and you want the 25th, instead of swipe the screen 4 times you can just enter the page number 5 and it will go the last books, off course this only works if the books are listed in the series order which not always happens, I think if you use the plugboards it will but I'm not sure.

Enter a 5 how?

Also, it's not that I want to get to the 60th book in a collection; it's that I want the 60th collection itself.

[jandrew]

Originally Posted by dvd8n

So I try the Search functionality instead. That works well - till I want to read the ninth book in the series. And what do I find? I find that the search results show eight to a page - and there's no way to page forward to the ninth result onwards. Really? Really?????

When searching, you only see a search preview until you actually hit the "Go" key to perform the search and get the returned page(s) of results (six to a page like the library list view).

Also, when in library view, touch the "Page 1 of 600" and you can enter a page number to jump to.

[dvd8n]

Thanks for that; it does make the thing a lot more useable. It's nowhere near as nice as the Sony with its simple slider with letters on the right though.

(And the slider is obvious to the user too).

[tempest@de]

Originally Posted by dvd8n

Swiping has absolutely no effect.

ok, maybe the aura works different from the glo, in my glo when I'm on the collections list or in the books list I change page by swiping my finger, taping doesn't work.

Originally Posted by dvd8n

How? Is it by hard buttons?



Enter a 5 how?

Also, it's not that I want to get to the 60th book in a collection; it's that I want the 60th collection itself.

If you tap in the number off pages in the upper right corner, either in the collections list or in the books list it will open a square where you can write the number off the page that you want.

[dvd8n]

As jandrew pointed out, the search isn't final 'till you hit the GO. Which I did not realise. Until you hit go, you get a results list that as far as I can see, you can interact with pretty extensively apart from the paging functionality.

You can put my issues down to usability issues or me being a bit thick, whichever you prefer.



It could easily be the first option.........

[dvd8n]

Originally Posted by tempest@de

If you tap in the number off pages in the upper right corner, either in the collections list or in the books list it will open a square where you can write the number off the page that you want.

Yes, jandrew pointed that out too. Looks like I'm the only user on the planet that didn't try pressing that bit of the screen.

[GeoffR]

Processing new books became dramatically slower in the current firmware 3.2.0, the previous version was more than 10 times faster on my Glo. If its not fixed in the next version you might consider going back to version 3.1.1.

In any case it is probably a good idea to just load a few books at first until you sort out how things work. There are a lot of options to improve the appearance and functionality of the books that need to be selected before sideloading them.

For example the wasted space at the bottom of the page in epubs is caused mainly by the orphans/widows stylesheet settings. This can be fixed by using an option in Calibre to modify the book's stylesheet as it is sideloaded. Better to discover that option (and many others) before you load your entire library.

[dvd8n]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

Processing new books became dramatically slower in the current firmware 3.2.0, the previous version was more than 10 times faster on my Glo. If its not fixed in the next version you might consider going back to version 3.1.1.

That's interesting......

Originally Posted by GeoffR

In any case it is probably a good idea to just load a few books at first until you sort out how things work. There are a lot of options to improve the appearance and functionality of the books that need to be selected before sideloading them.

Yes. I thought that I'd done that with my collections testing but it seems that it did not help. When I created the full set it fails. Of course I'm assuming that it's the number of collections that is causing me my issue with them; it may be something else.

Originally Posted by GeoffR

For example the wasted space at the bottom of the page in epubs is caused mainly by the orphans/widows stylesheet settings. This can be fixed by using an option in Calibre to modify the book's stylesheet as it is sideloaded. Better to discover that option (and many others) before you load your entire library.

Where is that setting? I'm a long time user of Calibre but never had to mess with style sheet settings before.

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by dvd8n

Where is that setting? I'm a long time user of Calibre but never had to mess with style sheet settings before.

The option is "Modify CSS" in the customisation menu for the KoboTouch driver. Then add body {orphans:1;widows:1} to your kobo_extra.css, and the books' stylesheets will be modified automatically when you send them to the Kobo device.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by dvd8n

As jandrew pointed out, the search isn't final 'till you hit the GO. Which I did not realise. Until you hit go, you get a results list that as far as I can see, you can interact with pretty extensively apart from the paging functionality.

The initial match list isn't a list of books. It is a list of matches in the fields that are searched. It will show matches in the title, author, series, and subtitle fields. Pressing one of these matches shows the books that fit that search. So, if the match is the series name, the books will be the books in the series. Because of this, rarely hit the Go button.

You can put my issues down to usability issues or me being a bit thick, whichever you prefer.



It could easily be the first option.........

How about a little bit of both?

The UI conventions I can think of are:

- Nearly everything in the UI that is in italics is an action. Press it and something will happen.
- Pressing on an item in a list will open the item.
- Pressing and holding on an item in a list will display a menu for the item.
- Swiping on a list will turn the page. The swipe can be horizontal or vertical.
- Swiping on text will turn the page. The swipe can only be horizontal.

[dvd8n]

Thanks. I'd not spotted the italics convention.

[Ken Maltby]

In addition to those options, you can add readers that use a traditional file manager that doesn't require the processing of your ebooks, like the database book management that Kobo uses. An install guide.

Luck;
Ken

[mahtin]

Originally Posted by davidfor

- Nearly everything in the UI that is in italics is an action. Press it and something will happen.
- Pressing on an item in a list will open the item.
- Pressing and holding on an item in a list will display a menu for the item.
- Swiping on a list will turn the page. The swipe can be horizontal or vertical.
- Swiping on text will turn the page. The swipe can only be horizontal.

Great easter egg!
That's what they should put in the box with the quickstart folder.