Here is a review I did and emailed 4/6/2009. This is focused on older ePUB support but the items apply to other formats as well as they all used a common engine and philosophy at the time. Most formats have not been updated for years.
I have been testing the EZ Reader and have a few comments on things that don't work well. First of all let me say I am very impressed with the hardware product. The battery life with the Keyboard locked is amazing. I can't even seem to get the battery to run down after weeks of intermittent use.
I have been looking at the ePUB format in particular but the comments will often be applicable to other formats as well since the same reader software is being used. The comments are numbered, not because of priority but just to be able to refer to them easily.
1. Please look at the reference ePUB files at:
http://www.infogridpacific.com/igp/A...d%20Resources/
In particular look at: People of the Abyss, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and This Dynamic Earth. Others may be useful as well.
2. There needs to be support for special characters. This is very important for ePUB, HTML and any format derived from html. I wrote some articles on this. Please see:
https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/ISO-8859-1 and
https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Special_characters
These articles identify the characters beyond standard ascii that need to be supported. They should be supported by the number code (in decimal or in hex) and the word code. (In the case of 8859-1 the codes as binary should also work (or even better Windows-1252). The examples show the use of many of the characters such as n-dash, curly quotes, degrees, etc.
3. If you can support UTF-8 then do it as well.
4. ePUB is a reflowable format. You treat is as if it were a page format like PDF. It is not. It should be more like mobi and the text should be continuous even when zooming.
5. ePUB support links like mobi does. There needs to be a menu item for follow link on pages that have them.
6. The three reference ePUBs (People of the Abyss, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and This Dynamic Earth.) do not show the first page but show a blank instead.
7. The People of the Abyss does not page correct when images are present. If the image cuts the page at the bottom then the next page will be missing some text. This Dynamic Earth also cuts images but does not seem to have this problem.
8. Cutting images is a serious problem as can be seen in these samples. I suggest that there be a view image choice on the menu that can open the image viewer on the diagram on the page (next/previous) can work if there is more than one image on the page. The image would then be shown full screen.
9. A similar capability should be present for tables as they can get cut pretty bad also.
10. The menu item 4 (Goto Index) is not the proper name for this as it really goes to the Table of Contents. It should say Goto TOC.
11. The about function (menu 5) should be better than it is.
a. The title currently just truncates if it is too long. It should wrap around at the right edge even if there is no space. The current Title is not the title, it is the file name.
b. There should be more items, such as Author, Genre, and more taken from the meta data not just the file name. All should wrap if needed.
12. The base font size should be adjustable by the user using a preference setting. All other fonts should be scaled from the base font size. Currently the default size is too small for some people. Not everyone is age 20 with perfect eye sight. When there is less ambient light available the user should be able to increase the font size to help see the text better. An eBook reader needs this feature.
13. When the margin is small to begin with the first zoom function should just be skipped. If the font size does not change much it is a waste. This would make toggling directions similar with only two.
14. The first and second zoom can have blank pages. The program should detect a blank page and skip it. It is annoying having to page over these blank pages (This happens on PDF's also and is just as annoying).
15. When opening a ePUB the total page count is wrong. I usually says /2. The display is being shown before the total is calculated I think and then not updated.
16. What does the page count mean? Is it a set number of bytes? Is it divided in half for landscape? The manual is unclear.
17. The <pre> tag needs to be supported. It should honor all spaces, line feeds, tabs, etc. except that the lines should wrap if they are too long (left justified only)
18. Hyphenation does not work correctly. Is it set for English? A preference item should permit turning it off.
19. In the eBook Hesse-Siddhartha (get it from the same place) the apostrophes, quotes, and some other punctuation has spaces before and/or after the character even though they are not supposed to be there. Note that this book has curly quotes so they must have been recognized differently in this case but they are still wrong due to the extra spaces.
20. It italic and bold fonts are available in the font set they should be used instead of making by slanting or pixel doubling the straight text. These techniques should used if there is no special font sets.
whew, that is enough for now. I will send a similar list for the mobi format as it has its own set of unique problems. I also have some comments for image mode.