Quote:
Originally Posted by davidfor
There is room for the page number on that line. Probably immediately to the left of the menu. It is about the only place it can go and be fairly consistent. But, there is some thing about it that I just don't like. Maybe that it would be mixing menu items with changing information on the same line.
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Another option would be to put the page number above or underneath the scrollbar, but I don't think it's a good idea as it would reduce the precision of the scrollbar, and you can just hold the scrollbar to see the current page if you don't have too many.
Personally, I only use the pagination controls in the library view for skimming the list of titles, quickly listing books somewhere in the sort order, or estimating how many books are in a given view. If I want something specific enough to need accuracy, I almost always know enough of what I want to be able to search for it directly.
I think the complaints about the scrollbar are either one of two things: a complaint about the look and balance of the UI (I personally feel that the scrollbar should appear smaller even if the tap area is the same), or an X-Y complaint related to book management on the reader itself which could be resolved in a more specific manner (like introducing a secondary sort dropdown so you can sort by two things).
In short, what I'd change is to add a secondary sort option (i.e. so it sorts by the first, but if equal, then the second) to allow for things like sorting by author then series+series-index. This might cause confusion for non-technical users, so it should probably be hidden behind a setting to show advanced library management options.
I would also make the scrollbar appear thinner, but still have the wide tap area (to make the interface appear more balanced and less cluttered).I don't think this is worth the effort, complexity, or time to implement though.
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One more thing people should keep in mind is that the Kobo library management is already superior to all other e-readers and phone reader apps I've used, and it's already more than good enough for the majority of uses and users the way it is.
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And, either way, I think this discussion about page numbers and the new pagination has gone on long enough. We've gotten to a point where nobody's going to agree on the same thing since they've already decided on and argued their opinion for a while, and if this change has enough complaints, it will be reverted, and if not, it won't be. After all, this release was one of the fastest and it was just to add pagination buttons.
Keep in mind that MR users are already a minority, so a minority/majority of a minority isn't really an important point to make either way. And, I agree with davidfor's prediction earlier in the thread that Kobo is planning to rework the UI over the next few releases. They've probably already decided more or less what they're going to do, and arguing back and forth here won't really change anything.
And, a few facts to give some perspective about the minority point: MobileRead only accounts for less than 30% of the forum traffic (which doesn't include traffic from direct, Google, blogs targeted at less-technical users, etc) to my kobofirmware page. And, mirrors/repackaged
versions of NickelMenu I've found (not including NiLuJe's OCP packages) with download counts have more downloads than the original one on GitHub itself. Granted, most productive discussion (about firmware, mods, and other random things about ebooks) happens here, but it doesn't change the fact that we're still a minority to Kobo overall.
Don't take this the wrong way, though; I believe MR is quite an important place for this sort of thing to be centralized in (just look at how naive the Reddit r/Kobo users tend to be...) (and I wouldn't have been able to work on my tools without the valuable discussion, people, and information here), but we need to keep in mind that even a majority of MR users won't alone be enough to convince Kobo of something.