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Originally Posted by speakingtohe
Ha ha on the parachute thing. Myself I always back up my SD cards whether I need to or not with two disk images made with two different imaging programs, and a straight file copy every time before I change firmware. I am a bit anal that way. Haven't had to use them yet but it costs nothing but 20 minutes of my time.
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The easiest way to make sure you won't need a backup is to have one.
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Originally Posted by speakingtohe
I don't do the epubcheck or flightcrew thing. No doubt they are invaluable but I am not anal in that way.
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I had issues with epubs years back when reading ebooks on my computer. That was when I discovered epubcheck/FlightCrew and Sigil. They made my reading life a lot easier. I had a fair number of Microsoft Reader .lit format ebooks and the utility I found to convert them to .epubs was, putting it gently, something I wouldn't have used if there was any other way to continue reading those ebooks.
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Originally Posted by speakingtohe
The 549 books were the exact same books I had on my Mini with no problems. The same books loaded flawlessly on my Aura a couple of times when I just deleted them and started over, and a few more times they didn't. And the Kobo didn't actually freeze it just took quite a while to come back. I believe you may have had a similar experience once or twice? Goes to the second set of squares and appears to be stuck? And you always use epubcheck don't you?
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I still have the issue when an uSD card is installed and the boot process stops for a while. The more books on the uSD card, the longer the pause. At least now with 2.8.1, the delay is in minutes. When I first got the Aura, the delay could reach hours. I thought my Aura was freezing until I left it over night and in the morning the boot process had completed.
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Originally Posted by speakingtohe
The thing with the Kobo being slow to boot does not seem to me to be connected to the actual books as it will boot in seconds at times and take over an hour at others. Same books. And for me the reboot doesn't always come after being connected to the PC. Sometimes it comes during a library search and I seldom search, or once when I accidentally hit a shelf tile on the home screen.
Yesterday it froze for about 5 minutes while reading a book. Then it came back, but displayed the cover of the book I was reading before that but that book did not come up on the current book tile. The book I was reading when it froze was in the top left tile and saying unread in the library view. I found my exact place again and it worked fine. I just don't see this as a fault in the book.
That plus the fact that recent updates have improved things quite a bit, maybe a reboot a month instead of several weekly or on occasion even daily indicates that it is a firmware issue. My books are pretty much the same. I will delete the ones I have read about once a month and put on some random new ones. I am glad that things are getting marginally better firmware wise, but admit that I think it is taken far too long.
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They have made improvements but there are still quite a few issues and ways that Kobo could improve their firmware. Even in the handling of non-standard epubs, it would be nice if an error message with the name of the book was popped up instead of sitting on the processing screen for hours. Out of curiosity, are you getting error logs after the freezes? They would show as stack_xx.log files. The disappearing books for instance sounds like the Kobo reset before updating the database and that generally generates an error log.
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Originally Posted by speakingtohe
As for the opening/searching, that has never been a problem speed-wise for me, just a pain in the butt as I have become accustomed to using shelves/collections on my other readers and find it not only faster but more convenient. Some readers don't have shelves or collections and that is fine, but if they are provided they should not require you to open the shelf menu and go have a coffee while you wait.
Sorry for being so curmudgeonly, but seeing a couple of the same voices that dumped on people who dared to criticise Kobo, mostly in a kind of Oliver Twist way, dumping once again on people who are only guilty of trying to work around the problems. Perhaps some people never get a problem. Good for them. I suspect for the most part don't read 5 or 6 books a week but I could be wrong on that one.
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I got into the habit of using search on my PC since it was faster that browsing through the directory structure looking for a specific author. I've since simplified my structure dropping most of the directory structure so now it's at tossup as to which way is faster. On the Kobo, I use search since it is much faster and more flexible than shelves.
For some of the comments pro and con about some posters, I'm on the fence there. There have been some criticisms of Kobo that I, personally, feel were not justified. Others I have agreed with. I tend to be suspicious of anyone who claims never to have any problems. As you said, they are probably not making much use of their ereader.
Going back quite a few years, there was a columnist (mostly noted for having a Windows logo tattoo) who kept stating that people who got regular blue screens with Windows 3.1/3.11 were simply not using their computers properly and he personally never saw any. Oddly, after Windows 95 was released and he switched, in one column, he commented that he happy to no longer see multiple blue screens every day.
Regards,
David