[Altivo]

Now that I've had a chance to actually read from the device and play with title display and selection, here is my assessment of 1.9.11 after the factory reset.

Some things do not work at all. One of these is display font selection. Although the settings still allow you to choose a sans-serif font for the display, it does not alter the actual display which remains in serif font. This used to work.

Power off does change the device to a powered off state. However, after doing this your access to titles on the "outboard memory" or external SD is lost and must be recovered by ejecting and reinserting the SD chip. This was not necessary with the older release. Also, regardless of the setting made for whether to display the book cover when powered down, the screen always goes to the default Kobo powered off display, showing no information about the current title. I consider these issues to be bugs in 1.9.11.

Sleep mode does work and does retain access to the external SD materials when reawakened. In sleep mode the device does display the cover image of the current book if that option is turned on in settings.

After upgrading Calibre to version 1.18 on Linux, Calibre does see the device and is able to display directories of the content on both main and outboard memory. Using Calibre to load a book to the main memory works as expected. Using Calibre to load a book to the SD or "outboard" memory appears to succeed and Calibre says the book is now loaded, the device does not see that book even after it processes new content. Examination of the content of the actual SD chip does not find the book, even though Calibre reported a successful transfer. I consider this to be a bug in 1.9.11.

Formatting issues I reported originally in 1.9.11 appear to have resolved themselves after the reset, with the exception of the inability to change the displayed font. Em dashes in the text are now correctly displayed. Italics are displayed in properly formatted epub files. The book I had been using for tests that showed some Italics and bold text as encllosed in square bracket escape tags (in both Calibre and on the Kobo reader) no longer shows the spurious tags, nor does it show those Italics as tagged. The chapter headings in that book now display on the reader as they did formerly, which is bolded, centered, and with numerals for the chapter number. Interestingly, on Calibre they still display right justified with the number spelled out in all caps. I believe this is a formatting issue in the particular e-book file, and not an actual problem of the Kobo reader. Further investigations of chapter headings, comparing the two displays, are a future consideration but primarily out of curiosity.

At this point the Kobo wifi ereader is once again usable, provided I do not power it off as was my practice in the past. The bad results of power off, the inability to change display fonts, and the inability of Calibre to write books to the outboard memory chip are nuisance factors, but not insurmountable. This still suggests that insufficient effort was put into testing and debugging the 1.9.11 firmware, and I don't particularly recommend installing this version if you are happy with what you have now.

Late addition: One other thing. I happen to be in the habit of reading multiple books at once, switching between them depending on my mood. The old firmware was quite cooperative with this, keeping books on the "I'm reading" list and showing percentage read no matter how many I had open at once. The 1.9.11 version seems to limit this capability to 5 titles or perhaps 6. When I open more than that, the oldest one disappears from the "I'm reading" list even though I haven't finished or closed it. Worse, in the listing of all books, it appears as "unread," though when opened again it returns to the page last displayed as it properly should do. This also seems like a pointless change on the part of the software developers. True, most readers probably read books sequentially; but I know that I'm not the only one who reads multiple books simultaneously. It really wouldn't take much to accommodate this, and especially so since they had it working in the past.