Quote:
Originally Posted by sadkingbilly
Hey all,
I recently started using my Aura One again and it asked for an update. Before it was annoying to work with the buggy and poor software but now it's gruesome. No longer the "history" I was used to but a new screen with "discover your next great book", "popular" and "read the manual of your kobo"... Which I can not in any way delete. (sw version 4.7.10413, 12-12-17)
Apart from that - Kobo keeps bragging that their software was developed in cooperation with ebook users but I find it really hard to imagine that ANY ebook user would want this sucky, slow and complicated software instead of a simple explorer menu like in windows. That way a folder can be put on the Kobo and simply accessed trough the menu, selecting the wanted book.
Noooo... They thought making ONE BIG list of ALL my books would be somehow convenient - especially for users with many ebooks on their reader. Yes, I know about the search function but since the kobo seems to be using some weird parts of the metadata (and we all know calibre sucks big time, is it a conspiracy?) so sometimes even though I changed author the kobo still displays the old entry making books disappear from the list when I search for author.
Shortly after I purchased the Aura One I put Koreader on it but that resulted in a bricked ebook and I had a hard time getting it working again - and not all functions worked correctly back then (march 2017) like backlight.
So.. What I would like is software that uses a very simple explorer menu, remembers the last X books I opened/read and which enables me to open a book from a folder instead of making collections..
/end of rant, sorry about it..
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Hope you are feeling better now.
Now for a turn at the tilt.
Interesting to read your whinging. So being able to search your ereader for the book you want by title, author or series is somehow less convenient than scrolling through a long list of subdirectories containing 3000+ books (in my KA1's case). Being able to sort by series, author or collections is not convenient. Hmmm... I wanted to re-read one of Gerald Durrell's Corfu books. Type in "cor" in the search box (a massive 4 taps on the screen) and on the live search results screen up popped Corfu Trilogy. One tap on that and I was viewing
My Family and other Animals,
Birds, Beasts and Relatives and
The Garden of the Gods. Using the simple Windows explorer interface and browsing for it, I ended up going through 610 directories named after author's to find the right one. Since there is no alphabetic listing I could tap to go directly to authors whose last name started with 'D', this took a few taps. Made me feel happy that I didn't use Geoffrey Zakarian's
My Perfect Pantry as the sample author and book.
And yes, I have compared search to the "simple explorer menu like in windows". Sadly, the simple explorer menu sucked compared to search. By the time I used KoReader to dig down into the directories to find the book I was looking for, using search had me reading the third chapter. You did notice that KoReader added a search function using the calibre metadata files? Of course, the creators of KoReader spend their time adding features that no one in possession of a moiety of their senses could possibly want.
As for the new home page? I don't pay much attention to the 4 tiles for the latest 4 books (compared to what? 7 or 8 on the old home screen which could include tiles such as Sync, Related To, Statistics, Take A Quick Tour, etc.) so I don't spend much time there and have no real opinion pro or con. One tap on the My Book tiles or the search icon on the home page and it's off to finding my next book. I suspect to you that filtering the books list by Reading, Unread, Finished, Purchased, Previews, Overdrive, Imported and Downloaded or being able to sort by Recent, Date Added, Title, Author, Series, etc. are useless fripperies. Being able to locate all books by an author whether they are the sole author or a co-author without having to generate a massive directory structure to allow covering all possible combinations or to be able to find a book in the series with a mix of authors are useless fripperies.
As for your issues with changing authors on a book? One wonders how you went about this? Opened the directory of your KA1 in your beloved Windows explorer and renamed it? Simple, easy and oh so very wrong. Renamed it in calibre, updated the metadata, deleted the copy on your KA1 with calibre and used one of the KoboTouch drivers to send it to your KA1? Two guesses as to which one of these would trigger the database update?
I will admit that I have never had the issues with calibre you evidently seem to have suffered. Your comment "
(and we all know calibre sucks big time, is it a conspiracy?)" seems to not match the experience of most calibre users. Perchance were you one of the few who keep whinging that Kovid Goyal will not change the directory structure used by calibre to match their personal wants? One of those who have trouble understanding that copying one calibre library over another using Windows explorer is
NOT A GOOD IDEA. That have trouble understanding that putting your calibre library on Dropbox and accessing it from multiple machines simultaneously is also in the ungood idea realm.
/end tilting at windmills mode