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Old 02-17-2010, 02:07 PM   #6
Kolenka
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Posts: 1,017
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Join Date: Jan 2008
Location: Puget Sound
Device: Kindle Oasis, Kobo Forma
Quote:
Originally Posted by dsvick View Post
I'm with you though Ben, I'd like to see more ability to manage collections and lists on the reader itself. Some of the things I'd like are:
  • Ability to mark a book read/unread
  • Ability to see the book details with out actually opening the book
  • Ability to rate books
  • Ability to control what information is displayed in the list (ie thumbnail, title, author, rating; or, thumbnail, title, synopsis
  • Ability to sort books in a specific order within a collection, so you could sort your to read list in the order you're going to read them.
Actually, you can sort books 'by order' in a collection. The order is set in the Reader Library app on the computer though.

I think the key stuff for collections is really being able to edit the collections on the device (creating, adding to, removing from, reordering), and the marking of the book being read/unread as you say.

Faster page turns might be nice, but battery life is good where it is, and faster CPUs will eat into any additional battery life without very good power management (Sony already has some of the best in the e-reader business).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben Thornton View Post
Beyond that, improved software to make it easier to manage a large number of books (including folder support, and the ability to avoid having to parse all the metadata from scratch in order to start reading).
Not sure folder support is a big one if collections are improved and can be edited on the deivce. Doubly so if I can create collections based on search queries like the 900 already hints at a bit.

Avoiding the refreshing of metadata is a hard one. If someone decides not to use the Reader software, then it is required for the device to function. And I don't think it is actually parsing it from scratch either. Time would scale linearly with the number of books you have, it seems to scale non-linearly, which suggests it's trying to find ways to reduce the work load.

That said, there are ways to improve the speed with larger libraries, but they are fairly complex approaches and the code would have to be able to fall back on more brute-force methods since they won't work 100% of the time.

My own sneaking suspicion is that there is a memory limit coming into effect that greatly slows down the scan on larger libraries (having to load large blobs of XML into structures can be painful... and is not an ideal way to store a DB). So you see decent refresh speeds based on what /changed/ up to a point. After that point, some unrelated effect comes into play and slows down the process due to limited memory.

Last edited by Kolenka; 02-17-2010 at 02:20 PM.
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