BeBook review

[Slite]

Originally Posted by Stormchild

Stick to your guns Spaze.
Bebooks crashing is not that common a problem. As for badly formatted files, you can hardly blame any e-book reader for peoples ineptitude. Even the MS reader falls over on some of the .lit files I have downloaded.

Really? How do you explain the fact that it's something that gets posted quite frequently on EI's support site, and here as well.

You can't blame the e-reader, but you can blame the implementation of the readers software, that instead of accepting it and saying "Ok. i'll pass this through with it's icky formating" but instead kicks you back to the index page or the bookshelf making it impossible to read the book.

As for the problems with sub/superscript in RTF. I fail to see that that would be anything but a bad implementation of the RTF parser in the firmware, and also, this is NOT a new bugg, it has been present ever since the BeBook came out. And it has not been adressed by EI.

Don't get me wrong, I like my BeBook a whole lot, I just don't like the fact that instead of FIXING the current problems EI concentrates on adding new content halfassed as well.

I think the major misstake they did is trying to support as many formats as possible instead of selecting a couple and saying "Ok, we will make these work REALLY well"

[spaze]

It seems that no matter what application you use to convert books from one format to another is just plain hell. I have found that taking a normal text file and by creating a BeBook formatted PDF is just the best thing. So I created a txt2pdf converter.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=54662

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Slite

Don't get me wrong, I like my BeBook a whole lot, I just don't like the fact that instead of FIXING the current problems EI concentrates on adding new content halfassed as well.

I think the major misstake they did is trying to support as many formats as possible instead of selecting a couple and saying "Ok, we will make these work REALLY well"

Agreed on both counts.
However...

1- Its pretty clear by now that except for minor cosmetic tweaks EI is dishing out whatever firmware the Hanlin crew puts out, as evidenced by the fact that the "Beta" firmware they dished out recently is the same as the "final" from Jinke and exactly the same as their own final. It doesn't appear like they have much of an in-house software operation or if they do its not working on the BeBook 1. The bugs in the BeBook firmware are universal across most of the V3 resellers and most have been there since I got mine a year ago.

2- The Hanlin V3's calling card *is* the support for legacy ebook formats and
the various document formats they support. Take that away and what's left? (now that they're on the Adobe kool-aid bandwagon) A Sony 505 clone, software-wise. And it looks like they're just running hand-me-down ADE code from an earlier 505 release, not even the "current" stuff.

When I first got my BeBook and saw how poor LIT support was I almost sent it back. The only thing that kept me from doing it was that the hardware was good and by the time I was done testing all the formats they had an update that made it a tad better. Up until February there was hope that the bugs would get eventually fixed.
By april that delusion was gone.
With BeBook what we see now is what we'll get.

I'm comfortable with that.

But only because the May OpenInkpot snapshot is so ridiculously useful and because Calibre really really likes LITs as feedstock for mobi/epub/fb2 conversion.

I don't regret my buys (just the milleage I've put on it in the last year justifies the purchase) but, despite my interest in the Hanlin V5 line, I'm not buying the Astak Pro until I *know* OI is running on it. (BeBook mini need not apply now that they're shipping via FedEx and I'm likely to get hit with their idea of import duty.)

And if Amazon comes up with a Kindle mini at 5" before then, its game over for me. If I have to convert/tweak my existing files (or break DRM and then convert) to get them to work right, I might as well just convert everything to Mobi and go with Amazon.

To me, lock-in by Adobe is just as offensive as lock-in by Amazon; but at least Amazon books are abundant and *less* overpriced.

US$0.02