Quote:
Originally Posted by davidfor
That would definitely be a bad idea.
There are various older versions of firmware that are popular for different reasons. But, if you are downloading books from Kobo, you will need to stay on the current version. Though there is probably a hack to stop the firmware update.
As I said, I've never noticed any real issues with kepubs. But, I don't read comics or manga.
I would expect that the Ultimate Manga Reader to be using CBR or CBZ as the format. Depending on how it is doing it, that probably explains the difference.
I did grab a free manga from Kobo to have a look: https://www.kobo.com/au/en/ebook/att...itan-sampler-1. It was a fairly random choice, but, I couldn't bring myself to try one of the Harlequin or Mills & Boons comics that were shown when I searched. And I was surprised that I had watched a movie based on it last year.
Paging through it on my Touch is pretty slow. It took over two seconds to turn the page. (Except the first page, but, that's because I was tapping the wrong side of the screen. Kobo loaded it as RTL and I didn't think of that  ) But, I didn't notice it get slower as I went along. It is has 66 pages, so it might not be long enough to trigger the slowdown.
I did try loading it as a CBZ and epub. For that, I downloaded the epub version and added it to calibre to strip the DRM. Then I sent it to the Touch twice. For one copy, I changed the extension to CBZ. That's enough to have the book handled as a comic book. The epub code is ignored. Both worked and the CBZ was noticeably faster at under a second to turn the page. The epub didn't work well as it didn't centre the image properly. That would be easy to fix.
I also tried the kepub on my Clara HD and Libra H2O. On these, the page turning was much faster, probably better than half a second. That makes sense as these have newer and faster CPUs than the Touch. And they have more RAM, 512MB vs the 256MB in the Touch. And the images did look better.
It is probably worthwhile trying it as a CBZ. I don't think there is any real advantage over kepub except the syncing to the Kobo server. That does make it easy to get the books and will sync the reading status if you use multiple devices or the Kobo apps. |
OK I think I know what's happening. I did look into how the ultimate manga reader stores comics, and it stores them as plain jpg files, probably just like how cbz files are made. So I think the extra code needed to run a kepub just slows things down on the touch's older hardware. At least when it comes to kepubs and pictures, as plain text books in the kepub format seem to run quite well.