[Peakcrew]

So, the key purpose of the KT is to read e-books.

I use Calibre (we are so lucky to have Kovid Goyal!) for managing my library, and this was another area of concern from reading the forums. Some people seem to have some difficulty with it, so I approached it with some trepidation. Opening Calibre and plugging in the KT worked well, with Calibre recognising the reader with no problem. However, when I clicked on the "Device" button, there was a quite scary warning notice saying that the KT database wasn't supported, things might be corrupted, worlds might collide, and the universe might be eaten by a giant sloth! Fortunately, I was forewarned by my forum-reading, and knew to click on the down-arrow at the side of the device button to get a drop-down menu, go into "Configure Device", and check the box labelled "Attempt to support newer software". All of a sudden impending doom was averted, and I felt like Scotty after saving the "Enterprise" again.

I decided to load just a couple of books last night. I chose one epub that I haven't edited, and another I have. I only have epubs in my collection, and so the slow page-turning that others have mentioned is a serious concern for me. I'm already worried that e-ink will be significantly slower than the TFT screen on the Jetbook!

However, I needn't have been worried. The transfer went well from Calibre to KT. With both the books the page-turn was very quick, once I found the technique to reliably change pages without highlighting words: this seems to be very short tap for page-turn, longer press for highlighting. I doubt the page-turn time is longer than I could do on a paper book, and certainly quicker than changing paper pages one-handed! I had to fiddle with the fonts a little bit, because the serif font it was using (Delima) was horrible. At the moment I'm using Felbridge, because it is very clear, but I'll have to try and find a good serif font, because for me it adds to the character of old books, such as H.G. Wells.

I don't know if it is just my lack of familiarity with the touch-screen, but it seems to take ages to register some presses, and yet respond to the slightest touch at others. It may be that I have the 'unresponsive screen' problem that others have mentioned, but I'll leave it a couple of days before making a judgment. However, I will commit to saying that the page back/forward arrows on menu pages are terribly unresponsive. [Additional to that - it seems that the technique is to aim just above centre-line of the arrow (and selection crosses). It seems that the detection grid and the graphic don't quite line up.]

Since the small book-loading experiment went well, I am about to load a larger number of books (about 50 in a range of file-sizes), and attempt to create some bookshelves. I'll report on that later.