[Altivo]

After restoring a copy of the pre-upgrade sqlite file (fortunately I had saved a copy,) the device can once again see the books on the internal memory. I then used the laptop and USB to copy a couple of titles from the external SD onto the internal memory. The reader did once again recognize those and made them available. So the internal memory is still accessible after all. The external SD simply doesn't exist any more as far as it's concerned. When I have time, I'll try a different physical SD card because I have a suspicion that this is an error related to timing and initialization of the hardware. I've seen something like this in other hardware in the past.

Another disturbing issue with this upgrade, though: the screen display formatting has changed so that books that were displayed normally before the upgrade now have issues. Italic text is being displayed not as Italic but instead is enclosed in |_ ... _| for instance. Some characters, such as the long dash, are replaced by a question mark. I don't know yet whether this affects everything or only certain files. It does affect the book I was reading at the time of the upgrade, which is a public-domain distribution. (A free book from a commercial distributor, one of those ones they use as give-aways.) The display of this book used to have a margin of one or two character widths around the edge of the screen, but now the text fills the screen right to the edge, which I find a bit distracting as well.

I suspect the coders were doing what they thought of as "improving" the display usage, without regard for the preferences of the end user or the book producer. It also looks as if they didn't test things out very well on the older devices or with older epub files.