[LivresInOz]

Originally Posted by davidfor

you did very little research before doing something that was obviously going to have side affects. This started with your warning about losing collections when you sign out of your Kobo device.

SERIOUSLY David: i say again:
feel free to name me one major service or device that loses such a large amount of (customer-created) data as the assignment of books (even 500+ books) to different collections.

I'd argue that this is NOT expected behaviour for most people, which is WHY I felt no compulsion to check on weird side fx. I also repeat: the person who gave the advice was a 'wizard' with thousands of posts, who literally said it wouldn't cause 'any problems', so I took that as enough advice. It seems pretty obvious you didn't read my posts before making these comments.

Originally Posted by davidfor

As far as I can see, no other ereader manufacturer supports this either. Kindles don't...In both of these cases, if you did the equivalent of signing out of the account, you would lose the collections.

All I know is that on the Kindle app on Android, you can put a book into a collection and those same collections will EVEN appear on that app on another device! Indeed, knowing this, it's entirely reasonable for a person to expect similar behaviour on the Kobo - because that is surely one of the most similar situations you can come up with. Given this, a SPECIFIC WARNING is the minimum a customer has the right to expect.

(...Especially considering many people will be familiar with the Kindle APP, but far fewer people will have both a Kobo and a Kindle DEVICE. So, most people, including Kobo owners, will go on their Kindle APP experience.

So - you say Amazon don't even retain the collections info for books you email to yourself. (Are you talking about ONLY the device, or also the Kindle APP?)
But how many people bother with that and therefore know that? Better to be safe than sorry and warn people. EVEN BETTER: get one over Amazon and enhance your USP of being able to easily load third-party books, by adding collections-retention as a feature!)

Originally Posted by davidfor

@zenji:And mostly it comes with a warning about what you lose.

The warning says NOTHING about collections. Just as it doesn't mention your bookmarks WILL be retained. It's far from perfect.

Originally Posted by davidfor

I'm a lot more surprised that you didn't complain about losing the reading status than losing the collection organisation. That is the usual thing people are worried about.

True, right? Esp considering I'm usually reading 10 books at a time. 🤣

But what you say does point out that people care about the retention of the information they most certainly spent time creating.

Originally Posted by davidfor

While you think Kobo is saving [bookmarks] for sideloaded books, they are not. The fact that they can survive a sign-out is almost a bug...

One man's bug is another man's feature. Again I say: this proves it's almost certainly technically possible for them to keep your collections info. So the Q consumers should ask is: why don't they?

Originally Posted by davidfor

One of the very common things new Kobo users have commented on over the years is the difficulty to put books in collections and then asked if there was an easier way to do it.

So my complaint is one many can sympathise with. (Though I must apologise for not scanning the entire site for past discussions before I brought it up! 🤣 )
Surely they could provide the option of saving all that useful data - whether or not it has to be UPLOADED somewhere (like your kobo-bought-books collection info already is...so much for it being a privacy concern).

Originally Posted by davidfor

And, as has been pointed out, there is. And again, it has been discussed a lot, so much there is a sticky thread in place for it. Hence the frequently offered suggestion to use calibre.

Yes - every cloud has a silver lining. Discovering how to do this has been fantastic. It's made things so much easier that I'm probably going to finish the project of moving my most important books to the Kobo. Kovid Goyal is a genius and a gift to all readers!

Originally Posted by davidfor

As to whether Kobo should be syncing this information, again, this has been heavily discussed here. Some people think they should, some are glad they don't...The privacy issues that @DNSB pointed out is probably a big reason....

Clearly it's important to many. So am I such a bad person for complaining about it? By the attack I got so quickly, it seems like some think so. If privacy is the main reason, it seems they can keep that info on the device after sign out using the same method that bookmarks are kept.

Originally Posted by davidfor

But, Kobo does not and have never claimed to. Why they don't, I don't know.

Whether some company claims to do something is not really relevant to whether its helpful to customers or not doing it is harmful.
Ford never claimed the Pinto would not explode on impact. 🤣
Toyota never claimed it would make an electric car - until it did.

Originally Posted by davidfor

They don't think enough of their customers want this to make it worth the investment.

Seems to me that what customers want is not a major guide for Kobo. Or they would have retained the external storage or at least offered a variation with it.



I also know - and I'm shocked that several people are ignoring this - that there is hardly a service or product on the planet that destroys this much user-created data on exit!

Originally Posted by davidfor

Lastly, and for my curiosity, when you spent all that time organising your books into collections, did you do it one at a time? Or did you use one of the methods to do it in bulk?

I did alot of it in bulk and - since I don't just decide to put someone in the 'dislike' basket and ignore the good they do - I will happily point out that their interface for doing this is pretty good. (One of many things l like about the Kobo!) But nowhere near as good as Calibre