Quote:
Originally Posted by the.Mtn.Man
But since you asked, I consider a feature to be "hidden" if it's not obvious to an average user. It should be "Search > Browse By Tags", or better yet, a top level menu item that simply says, "Browse By Tags". Hiding this feature two layers deep under "Calibre metadata search" is not obvious and is poor interface design.
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I largely agree with you that KOReader has UI conventions that are non-obvious. I had to internet search for how to apply formatting by default to all books, because the long-press thing never occurred to me, and there were no affordances that made it obvious. It's extremely "UI designed by programmers" rather than by UX designers.
But... the virtue of programmer-UI is that even if the UI conventions they choose aren't obvious, they're generally consistent. Once you get in the KOReader mindset, and start to internalize how it's designed and how its authors would have thought about features, things get more "intuitive." (Which is probably why your interlocutor is so astonished that these things seem non-obvious: If you've gotten your mind into the place where they're obvious, you won't realize how opaque they are to newcomers.)
But also also, the knocks on KOReader as unintuitive are kind of a "relative to what" situation. If you're happy with an out-of-the-box Kobo reader, well, carry on and enjoy your untroubled existence. But when I tried it, I found lots of things that needed "edit this hidden setting in a config file" (like widow/orphan suppression -- I read at big text sizes, and this is annoying with that) or that couldn't be done on-device at all, like overriding publisher justification settings in some books (large text and full justification don't go together well).
If you are a Calibre power-user and are happy installing tweaks and extensions and editing config files, then... yeah, okay, sure, you could fix those things and continue using the base Kobo software. But I don't use Calibre (I do direct Dropbox integration so I never need to plug the Kobo into a computer to get books on it), and I found KOReader to be easier than piles of tweaks.
All that to the side, though, the real "I can't go back ever" win of KOReader for me was Progress Sync. I use my Kobo at home, but I don't take it with me to the grocery store or whatever, and yet I still want to read my book when I'm standing in line or otherwise have a few minutes free. Kobo's default reader simply doesn't sync to the mobile app at all for side-loaded books (or at least it didn't used to a few years ago when I last tried it). But KOReader does, so I can get a cross-device sync experience smoothly. Plus, KOReader for Android is much nicer than the Kobo Android app, even if it would sync.
Plus, the part where page turns are faster in KOReader matters a lot. It's a small thing in a lot of ways, but "turn the page" is like the #1 most frequent interaction I will have with whatever e-reader software I'm using, and so an improvement there is huge.