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Originally Posted by jgray
I thought I'd make a comment about the way Mobi does the funny paging. My understanding is that this is due to the fact that the format originalted on Palm devices and all the constraints imposed by that. It seems that to speed up the handling of long ebooks, the text is stored in the Mobi file in chunks that are decompressed on the fly when reading. Only a specific chunk of text is decompressed at a time, which is the cause of the paging problem when you jump a huge distance in the file. This is especially bad when you jump backwards, as others have noted.
So, if Bookeen implemented the Mobi way of doing things (which it seems they did), then the Cybook is going to have the same problem as any other Mobi reader software, on any platform. As to whether they are allowed to implement this differently, only they know for sure.
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Exactly. And from what I've studied about the Mobi format, it ain't gonna be easy unless Mobi updates their presumptive model on what platform is used. There's tons of PDAs out there which have more memory and better memory handlers. Plus there are the Linux, Mac and Win PC families and now the e-ink devices. Sure, having rigidly-defined 'chunks' for much older PDAs and the cellphones makes sense - but even there Mobi could take a page from, say LZ compression techniques and just have a 'sliding-window' of 'working' text from within the single-file of ebook data.
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This just points out one more reason to move away from archaic ebook formats like Mobi (and others), which were designed long ago, under different constraints than we have today. Why carry the old baggage forever?
The other thing that is missing from this discussion is the fact that the Cybook handles other ebook formats, not just Mobi. How is the paging issue handled in these other formats by the Cybook software?
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Hmmm... Don't really read much HTML because my source for HTML ebooks tends to put each chapter into it's own HTML file. That's a non-starter for the Cybook at this point. And the few TXT ebooks I've seen are so heavily laden with line-breaks as to make them damn nea unreadable - and we all know the Cybook doesn't do RTF just yet. That leaves PDF. And it does a decent job of 'displaying' the file, but if the PDF ebook isn't pre-formatted for the Cybook, that's just hell to use. And I never get quite the fineness of control of font sizes.
Now if someone - anyone - would just port FBReader over to a Cybook, that might be a non-DRM alternative. (Of course, if someone *were* to port FBReader over, could they implement the Pukall PC1 cipher decryption module so's to allow for reading Secure Mobi? The module ain't that complex.)
Derek