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Once again, it seems like we've picked up a few nice features, but implemented in a "not really ready for prime time" fashion. Maybe it's better for KEpubs, and maybe it's better for people who don't use an SD card, but I wish for once that things would actually work the way they're advertised.

To wit -- wonderul new feature -- shelves. However, if you upgrade the software, your shortlist disappears. Yes, it has now been (sort of) re-implemented as a shelf, which makes sense, given the shelf paradigm. However, you would think that people would realize that installing an upgrade should take the existing Shortlist and convert it to a shelf. Instead, installing the upgrade trashes the Shortlist, and leaves you to have to re-create it. This can be a royal pain, especially if you have several hundred books on your KT.

This brings us to problem 2 with shelves. To enable shelves correctly, you basically have to factory reset your KT. After reading forums, you discover that there is now this "feature?" that says you are logged in to your KT (a somewhat novel concept). To get shelves to work you have to log out. Once you log out, your KT returns to "fresh out of the box" mode, so you have to connect to the desktop app, and start the setup process again. Of course, all this really does is waste storage space on the KT by adding advertisements, bits of locked books, and other garbage. Once you've re-set it, the KT loses contact with the SD card, so much of your library disappears. Fortunately, popping the card out and back in seems to clear the problem. Now we can proceed to re-building the Shortlist as a shelf.

And thus we come to problem 3 with shelves. Open the shelf, click on Add Books, and we get presented with a list of everything on the KT, as you would expect. The list is presented in ascending alphabetical order by Title. OK, I know the content of my shortlist by author, since I think of it as "the new one by so-and-so". No problem, we'll just re-order the list, since we can change list orders everywhere else on the KT. But...guess what? There is no way to change the order of the list, so now we have to try to remember the title of each new book to add to the list.

Oh, and now we come to problem 4. There is no way to easily jump through the list of books, except to use the search feature, which means having to type in at least partial names or titles. In other lists, there is this rather nice little double-ended arrow at the bottom of the screen. You can click on one end or the other of the arrow to move by a single screen. Or, you can click in the middle of the arrow to jump into the middle of the sorted list. Therefore, you can fairly easily get to the "M"s, or the "L"s. However, if what you want is to find a book to add to a shelf, it's pretty much page at a time.

This brings up problem 5. When you do try to use the search feature, clicking the Go button often causes a near-reset to occur. I realize that you're only supposed to click on the suggested search item, but the overall slow speed of the process tends to lead one to click on anything that seems to say "press me". And yes, adding a group of books to a shelf seems to take way longer than it should.

In closing, I'll touch on one more "feature". Font tuning is quite nice, and the new presentation engine is way nicer for presenting pages with drop-caps, and other font tweaks. However, I wish a way had been found to do this without losing the performance gains in page turns. I really liked the fact that page turns and "dead tap" problems had been nicely fixed in the latter 1.9 releases. However, there is a noticeable slow-down in page turns with the new font features.

All in all, some nice new stuff, but the user interface needs some real work, and some more thought should have gone into managing the transition. As with too many other software vendors, we get new features (with new bugs) but the old bugs don't get addressed.

And for the record, I couldn't give a rat's ass about Facebook connectivity, or publishing my reading results to any where. I consider those "features" to be an invasion of my privacy, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see someone raise a complaint to the Canadian Privacy Commissioner to ensure that these "features" are either removed, or turned off by default. I would much prefer to see them not even installed except by specific request from the user.

Norm