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Old 05-30-2013, 06:59 PM   #427
DNSB
Bibliophagist
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Posts: 34,517
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Join Date: Jul 2010
Location: Vancouver
Device: Kobo Sage, Forma, Clara HD, Lenovo M8 FHD, Paperwhite 4, Tolino epos
Quote:
Originally Posted by t.kruse View Post
Thanks for all replies. I will check the options for changing the cover image and the extended Kobo Calbre driver.

I want a reader that is robust and can handle some non-perfect formats and non-perfect metadata in a benign way. For metadata, look at any current Smartphone Music library. You just give it a title, or even just some mp3, and it fetches all the metadata, and allows to see organized views of a collection by band, by album, by year, by genre, see the lyrics and whatnot else. I just want the same for books, no having to go and edit metadata myself. And a reader that cannot guess that "John Doe" and "Doe, John" are the same name seems a bit weak in comparison. I can also blame calibre in this case, sure.
I've looked at quite a few music library management programs including the ones used by Apple and Samsung. You give them garbage in and you get garbage out. Even with automated metadata, to use one group, I have albums sorted as "The Band", "Band, The" and "Band". Yes, searching for artist with "band" returns all three. You can use Calibre to fetch metadata for your ebooks and it will even correct the author, title, title sort and author sort for you. Of course, there are times when you look at those corrections and go what the expletive deleted did it do that for!

Quote:
Originally Posted by t.kruse View Post
I know I could spend hours just perfecting the metadata of my collections, but that's a pointless activity given the millions of other readers with the same problem and the resources that vendors and publishers have.
Quite a few publishers have very little idea of what looks good in an ebook and how the metadata should be organized. Oddly, quite a few don't seem to care either considering they keep making the same mistakes book after book.

Quote:
Originally Posted by t.kruse View Post
I understand why people would not browse their library that much, because the library is so difficult to handle on the ereader. But search is different from browsing, it has a very different purpose. If it is a sunny day, I want to read a new book from my collection, then i want to browse the collection, not search in it. That's why all stores offer browsing and searching both.And why should browsing my collection on my eReader be a pain?
Newly added books are near the start of the list when I view the library sorted by recent. Otherwise, I'm generally looking for a book by an author and a simple search by author returns those books. The segment of my ebook collection on my ereader is not all my ebook collection but 1700 are enough to get by for a few days. Since I got the Aura, I will also enter a random page number in the go to and see what's on that page when I'm just looking for a random book to read.


Quote:
Originally Posted by t.kruse View Post
Regarding 0% read vs. unread vs. unfinished, currently the ereader tries to read mymind anyway. It reasons like: "oh this guy openened the file once, so I'll change the state from unread to 0% read so that the guy remembers". I think the default should be different, as long as a file has not been looked at for more than just the opening page, it's last status (unread / finished) should not be changed. That's no more or less mindreading than what is happening now.
I often open all the books in a series starting with the last so 5 showed on the carousel and up to 8 on the Aura. Handier that way. As I said, you opened the ebook. While you did not read enough to qualify as 1% read, that, in my opinion, is enough to move the book back to reading in progress. You can always dismiss the tile on your home screen or open the book and mark it as finished.

Quote:
Originally Posted by t.kruse View Post
Regarding sorting by type, I meant epub vs. pdf vs. cbz/cbr. Of course comic books can come as epubs then maybe filtering by file size would help. Somthing around 5 MB may serve as dividing line between mostly text and mostly images. Anything would be more useful than having no means of filtering at all, even if perfection is not possible
I have very few CBR/CBZ files on my ereader, the pdfs are tech materials. The remainder are epubs. Some of the epubs and quite a few of the pdfs are larger than 5MB with two epubs clocking in at over 200MB. There is nothing to stop you from having an epub that contains only image files and using .kepub allows you to zoom those images. CBZ/CBR files do not have a standard for metadata though ComicRack is pushing their ComicInfo.xml metadata format so no hope of reading the metadata. What I understand from what you have written is that, 99.9% of epubs would labelled as novels, CBR/CBZ files would labelled as comics and pdf files woudl get random values.

Quote:
Originally Posted by t.kruse View Post
I knew that, my point was it should not be a default to start with.
Your original message made that clear. However, you are one person. I happen to like those page numbers. Evidently, someone at Kobo also liked them but they gave you the option to be able to turn them off.

Quote:
Originally Posted by t.kruse View Post
I have had the eReader for a week, how many book purchases would be normal by now? And what does it matter anyway?
That you did not recognize the statistics display from a .kepub.epub as supplied by Kobo suggested that you are not purchasing many books from their bookstore.

As for normal? When I got my first ereader, I already had about 150 ebooks that were either purchased or free downloads from various internet sites. By the time, I picked up my first Kobo, I was up to 1100. I've since added quite a few more. The first week I had the original Kobo, I added about 50 mostly downloaded from Baen catching up on some older titles. I average around 5 books per week.

As for what does it matter? Kobo does respond to complaints about the books they sell. You might want to complain to the suppliers of your ebooks that have lousy metadata about their quality control.

Quote:
Originally Posted by t.kruse View Post
EDIT: And another Suggestion: if an epub file has an embedded image, then zooming in that image should be much more convenient such as long tapping or double tapping the image and get it in full screen mode. In my case a book had a "hand-written" note in it, and using the zoom menu to make it readable did not go well with my reading-flow.
Are you suggesting a pinch to zoom?

Regards,
David
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