[davidfor]

Originally Posted by zenji

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.

Dare I suggest "Windows"? If you delete an account from a Windows PC, you lose all the configuration you have done. And all the data you mistakenly kept in the documents directory. The data you kept elsewhere should be available. If I create that account again, I won't get that configuration back. Deleting the account from the device is what you are doing when you sign out of the account on the device.

And exactly how much would you lose if you signed out of your phone? I know there is plenty of things in the phone that will be wiped if I signed out and then back in a few minutes ago.

But, I'm pretty sure that Kindle also does it. And tolino. Adding sideloaded books (books added to the device using the USB port) to collections for both is only a local configuration and is lost when you sign out.

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.

You trust someone just because they have a lot of posts? That isn't a very good idea. What if all of the thousands of posts are in some other part of the forum and this was their first post in a Kobo related. But, that

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!

Yes, that does happen. But, it is not the same. Remember we are talking about sideloaded books. Books that are added to the device via the USB port. Books that are not uploaded to the server. Neither Kobo or Kindle automatically add books that have been sideloaded to the devices to their servers.

The Kindle app works differently. You have to explicitly add the book to the Kindle app. And that automatically uploads the book to the server. And the book will download to other instances of the app, and I assume the Kindle devices. If the collection information does not follow the book, then I would be complaining.

But, as Kobo does not sync the sideloaded books, it has nothing to sync the collection information with. So, how is it supposed to restore the information?

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.

Sorry, just because one company does something doesn't mean others should. And just because one does it one way, doesn't mean that all companies should do it in exactly the same way. No one should expect the same behaviour. Hope maybe, go looking for it, yes. Look to see what if they do a similar thing, definitely. But, not expect the same thing. And people do buy different devices because they are wanting different behaviour.

As to the warning, it possibly isn't good enough. But, if they do what you are suggesting, then it would be several pages long and would be as useless as the current warning as no one would read it. And yes, I am serious that it would need to be that long to cover everything that might possibly need to be covered.

(...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?)

No, I did not say that. The discussion is about sideloaded books. Kobo does not have anything like the email to an account method so I was not discussing that. But, as I have said here, Amazon does sync the collections for books added to their syncing environment. But, that cannot be done by sideloading to a Kindle using the USB connection.

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!)


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

It doesn't tell you that the bookmarks will be retained because in many cases they will not. Something I carefully explained in my post. It also doesn't tell you that you will need to sign into your Adobe, Pocket and OD account again or that you will lose a lot of statistics. The message talks about what can be saved, not what can't be saved.

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

You should note that the above comment and similar is what is rubbing people the wrong way. That will be taken by most as a snide comment from you demonstrating you are superior to them. No matter what you think, it is insulting.

There are plenty of people here who have multiple books on the go at the same time. I normally have two or three. There are people reading books that are published serially, so they have those open to the last chapter they have read while waiting for the next. I have had a book open for a long time because I couldn't bring myself to read the last chapter. There are lots of reasons to have multiple books opened. And a lot of people want to keep a record of what they have finished. The Kobo devices display this well and make it easy to filter books in different states. Which makes it easier to find books/

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

It doesn't tell you that the bookmarks will be retained because in many cases they will not. Something I carefully explained in my post.

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?

Just about anything is technically possible. Whether it is desirable or practical is another matter.

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! 🤣 )

Well yes, it is on you to do some research when looking for the solution to a problem. And that does mean looking through the site for related discussions.

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).

Kobo already know about your books bought from them. And syncing them and the details about them is a service they explicitly offer. So, it is something you agree to. If you disagree with it, there are ways to avoid it by manually downloading the books and sideloading.

And no, saving extra information is not necessarily desirable. Again, you think it is, but not everyone else.

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!




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.

No, clearly it is important to you. Nowhere have you demonstrated that it is important to others. Your "poll" about sideloading books does not demonstrate it. From experience here, collections are far less popular than you seem to think. Especially since Kobo added the Series tab. That was one of the popular uses for collections. For those here still using collections, they recognised the difficulty in managing them on the device and found another way to do it. That means that losing them if they need to sign out is completely insignificant.

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.

No, but what they do claim is important in what the product will do. If it doesn't do that, then you should complain and get them to fix it. But, if it doesn't do something that they don't claim to do, then a complaint isn't what you should be doing. Making a request to add that function is reasonable. Examining why it was you think it was something the device did is something you should also do. Maybe you brought the wrong product.

And bravo on the pertinent examples. It must have taken you such a long time. The problem is that they are far more damaging to your point, and everyone's opinion of you, than they are helpful.

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.

Sorry, but Kobo definitely responds to their customers. The problem is that they decide which of their customer requests to respond to, not you and or me. While I have been using Kobo devices, they have added features I thought were useless and removed features that I wanted to use. But, I know that those changes were in response to customer requests. Or in response to customer support problems.

But, a very important thing is to remember that the members of MobileRead, and that includes you, are not really the target market for Kobo. Or Kindle or any other ereader manufacturer. What we want to do with these devices is different from the typical users of these devices. And adding all the features we think are important would make the devices much more complicated and cost a lot of money for development, testing and support. All that for a very small number of potential sales of devices. And no guarantee of an increase in number of books sales (as demonstrate by your "poll").

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!

See my first comment above. And the fact that you use the word "hardly" makes your claim invalid. You obviously know of others that do something similar.

But, most of this is personal opinion with some personal experience thrown in. Your opinion is that the warnings given aren't good enough. I don't agree. I'm not convinced that they need more. But, in the end, it is up to them to decide what to do based on feed back from their customers.

Which leads me to my last comment...

You have told Kobo about this, haven't you? I mean, with all the claims of them breaking your device, I am sure that you reported the problem to them so that they know it is something that they must fix.