Quote:
Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan
For me, the FIRST thing I would like is the ability to organize my library inside Kobo in any way. As it is now, it's almost unusable. People complain a lot because Booken had only a list of books TWO YEARS AGO and now Kobo is in the same way.
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This this this so much this. I'd feel dumb for not checking for this before I bought one, but... it's 2011! I really did not expect that a device meant to store hundreds of individually complete entertainment files would *not* have any kind of sorting scheme beyond favourite/not-favourite and alphabetical or file-last-accessed-(not-the-same-as-book-being-read), you know?
Given that at most you can show six books on a screen at once, I think it'd work fine if I only had fifteen books. I've got a hundred and five, on a device that bills itself as being able to carry a thousand, and I was expecting to have four to six hundred, loosely, by the end of the year.
I understand the "delete what you're not reading" theory. But if I'm going to restrict myself to a tiny handful of books, and sit down in front of my library at night and sift through it to see what book I want to take along tomorrow... I can do that with realbooks. Weigh a little more, but don't need to be nearly so careful with them.
Other stuff I would like:
(1) The ability to mark books as *unread.* Not finished, since finished books stay up in the Recent Reads queue. Just something to have the system ignore the fact that they were ever opened. At the moment, I'm actually twitchy about letting other people look at my ereader, because they're probably going to poke something (which is the point of a touchscreen, I know) and then I'm going to be doing the scroll through library/open book/back to library dance until the books I'm currently reading are back at the top of the list where I'd rather they were.
(2) Some way to sort based on the attributes that do exist, like "Finished" and "I'm Reading." Right now, I can't tell my Kobo Touch not to display books I've already read. I can't tell it to only display books I haven't read, or only display books I'm reading.
Also, being able to assign books to the Previews and News&Mags categories would be nice. I want epub subscriptions to magazines Kobo doesn't carry, and it'd be nice to be able to put them in that category instead of "Books". And there was one item in the Kobo store which was essentially a half-dozen excerpts of novels being published in the coming months. It's filed under Books. Throws me every time I spot it; it is so a preview, even if it is not a "file you can click on and get an offer to buy a particular book from Kobo".
(3) The ability to jump to a particular letter in the alphabet when files are sorted alphabetically, either by author or title? I was talking to people who had the last Kobo, and when I finally realized what they thought I could do and explained that "
alphabetical sorting, like Recent Reads, just tells you which screen you're on--11 of 18, f'r ex. There's no way to jump to "G" or "L" or anything else" they looked at me like I'd... well, like I'd gone out and bought a blender that didn't have newfangled stuff like "settings" or an "ON switch". You just plugged it in when you wanted it to run.
Between that and the lack of an "I'm Reading" category, they are both being very glad they have the last edition. I was hoping one of them would want to swap, but given the general reaction to that idea ATM{1} I think it's unlikely. I'm seriously thinking of returning the Touch; I haven't yet because it was bought as a gift with birthday money, and I already told the gifter I liked it.
(4) The ability to display a line or two of flavour text, as well as the cover image, when you set your library to display one book at a time.
(5) The ability to add notes to highlights. (I know you get the option to write a comment if you want to post a highlight to Facebook. I'd like to be able to make notes that don't require an internet connection and are actually stored on the device.)
L&c,
F
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{1} "I've got the old version + wifi, and I'd been thinking of upgrading to the touch, but now they can pry my non-touchscreen out of my cold, dead hands."