I really hope "we" find a way to make the stats reappear for the sideloaded kepubs, it is my favorite function... but because the pic zoom is such a great improvement, I think I'll have to use the new 2.9.x when it comes out.
Re 2.8.1: in the end I updated. It was smooth except the fact I had to abort the annotation/readinglife/whatever sync that the kobo desktop app was attempting (i have no annotations anyway) because it wasn't working, after 1 h it was still at.. say.. 10%, frozen (only that, I could do other things with the app!). So I didn't know if it had updated or not (I saw it had DL the update though, but I didn't know if aborting those sync would have compromised the update), I ejected the device and it said "updating" then I checked the fw when it was done and it was 2.8.1. MAH. anyway, it works, so all is fine
