Suggestions for Firmware V1.5?

[StealthyScribe]

Originally Posted by digital_steve

you know a workaround for the 'im reading' page is to go to the last page of the new books you've bought in the kobo software (or whatever you use) then open them on your kobo and flick a page to mark it as read... voila! gone.

That's what I do now...but it takes a long time when you've got about 17 books like I do. The last time I got a new book and did this with all the ones I've read, my battery meter dropped by one tick just by opening books and turning that last page. I makes much more sense to just let them be on the device and to be able to sync a brand new book without having the old ones appear again and again. If it's taking so long with 17 books, I can't imagine how bad it'll be with those who have 20, 30, 40+ books they've added to the device.

[digital_steve]

Once you've done it once, you only need to do it for the new books you buy... only annoying once.

[Bittybye]

The only things I'd really like to see is

1) Turn off the auto off.
2)Failing #1 a much, much faster startup.
3)Being able to sort my books by when I added them to the Kobo.

[Mysterio]

I would like it to take less than an hour to download and sync. a 1MB epub file

[HamsterRage]

Originally Posted by Bittybye

3)Being able to sort my books by when I added them to the Kobo.

Oooh! Oooh!

That's a great idea!

[Zyzomys]

Originally Posted by Mysterio

I would like it to take less than an hour to download and sync. a 1MB epub file

It does not take me that long to add every single book I have in calibre. I too would be concerned if this was happening to me.

[Pookeysgirl]

Originally Posted by digital_steve

Once you've done it once, you only need to do it for the new books you buy... only annoying once.

You have to do that to ALL the books you have ever bought from Kobo EVERY time you sync it. So, not only once. I personally have had to do it more than 10 times. It's annoying every time. And I only have 8 books, so far.

[thp1017]

hmmm, that sounds like a bug either with the sync tool, or the bookstore, rather than the kobo itself...

I've read 10-15 books so far (all drm-free, either from Baen or the like, or where I grabbed the book online because I already have a tree-ware copy), and haven't had any problems at all. I guess I also don't use the sync tool, but rather copy files to the kobo directly...

There is also a way to reset the status of all of the books by editing the sql database on the kobo - I had randomly opened a bunch of books to look at the formatting, and didn't want to close all of them manually, so it was infinitely quicker to do it that way. Info can be found somewhere in the forums on how to do this, its easy enough.

Not that I wouldn't love to see a "Close book" option in the next firmware release, of course

[Gedvondur]

Lots of great suggestions above! Here's mine:

* Let us CHANGE the INTER-LINE SPACING. So the sentences can be closer together, thus requiring fewer page turns

* Let me ROTATE the book 90 degrees to the RIGHT. the buttons are then left had accessible, wider is sometimes better than narrow (landscape vs. portrait reading in other words).

* READ while CHARGING. 'enuf said.

* glow in the dark!!!! (ok, i'm being silly)!!

* And for KOBO II??? chuck a couple solar cells onto the front and let it self charge! WooHoo!

[dmacmart]

I don't think anyone's mentioned - show total # pages in book and current page #, AS WELL AS chapter progress.

[fab0109]

Next page button is a single point of failure ..

The next page button will be very used, what is the MTBF ?

Middle pad button look like more robust ..

I like to choice button function assignation

home : next page
menu : next chapter

Very useful to read rss feed (for right hand)

When do you publish the source of the firmware ?

We can help reviewing and correcting bug

[cas67]

my wishlist for the next update:

1. user-configurable auto-off and auto-sleep timeouts (incl. 15m, 30m, 1h, 2h, 3h, and Never).
   
2. sleep mode displays current page, perhaps with some sleep indicator.
   
3. power-off displays cover.
   
4. much faster power-on. ~45 seconds is way too slow. aim for 10 seconds or less, but 20 would be OK.
   
5. display last viewed page or menu while rebooting. would greatly improve perception of boot time, if not the reality.
   
6. support for Calibre's series name and index metadata. perhaps other metadata like genre (tags), publication date, summary/blurb etc too.
   
7. a "View Series" option for the menu. a 2-level menu. first level lists all of the book series installed (ignoring non-series books). Select a series and the 2nd level shows all books in that series, in order - with currently-reading or last-read highlighted.
   
8. ability to set sort by author (rather than title) as the default. i rarely, if ever, want to view by title. i remember books by author first, and title second. and that's how i choose what i want to read too.
   
9. a condensed listing mode, fitting more books onto the screen. just one line per book, no cover image, with author/title (and series/number).
   
   alternatively, something like:
   
   • Author Name
     • Title (Series/#)
     • Title (Series/#)
     • Title
   • Author Name
     • Title
     • Title
10. ability to read while charging.
    
11. battery indicator at bottom of page, along with page number
    
12. dunno if it's possible but it would be nice to quickly flip back to the previous page (i frequently push the next page button too early when i'm getting near the bottom of a page, and then have to press prev page to read the last paragraph). i suppose this depends on whether most of the delay is due to rendering the page or e-ink update latency. if the former, then caching the current rendered page (or the last few pages) would help a lot.
    
13. a skip to next/prev chapter mode. perhaps by holding the next/prev button for a second or two. i read the same book on both computer screen and on kobo and this would make it easier to catch up on the kobo to where i am on the computer.
    
14. bugfix: don't crash/freeze on corrupted epubs. i've noticed a few times that bad epubs (e.g. from a failed calibre auto-convert) will cause the kobo to lock up while "processing new content". the only way to fix that at the moment is to use a paper-clip to reset and then connect to a computer and delete the offending epub. The Kobo should just gracefully skip to the next epub rather than freeze.
    
15. display title and author of books (or just the directory/filename) as they are processed....so that if there is a problem with a book, i can easily tell which one it is.
    
16. a pony. no, make that a riding dragon.

other wishes:

1. source release, including all compilation scripts, notes, etc to produce an installable image. grepping for copyright strings shows that some of the software on the Kobo is GPLv3, so that's an obligation not merely an optional favour...at least for the operating system and the FOSS software components.
   
2. provide source and documentation and other assistance to help the OpenInkpot people port OI to Kobo.

[mdurham]

Originally Posted by Gedvondur

Lots of great suggestions above! Here's mine:

* Let us CHANGE the INTER-LINE SPACING. So the sentences can be closer together, thus requiring fewer page turns
[/I]WooHoo!

If they did this I would buy a Kobo immediately, the line spacing is just too big. My guess is they did it to make turning the page quicker, less work for the CPU.
Cheers, Mike

[thp1017]

Originally Posted by cas67

1. much faster power-on. ~45 seconds is way too slow. aim for 10 seconds or less, but 20 would be OK.
   

As much as I'd also love to see a super quick startup time, some times x, y, and z all need to happen, and there may not be a way to speed it up. I like your suggestion of showing the last page viewed quickly while things are booting up, and/or the previously made suggestion of NOT opening the "I'm reading" list on bootup, as that also slows things down.

With respect to the startup process, I wonder if there are some things that could be remove from the boot-up process, in favor of requiring us to *manually* do it. Right now, it seems that every bootup the software compares the books on 'disk' with whats listed in the sql database, and updates it as needed, which has to take a not insubstantial amount of time. I certainly wouldn't mind removing this from the bootup process, and then having something in the menu somewhere to "search for new content" - that makes more sense to me than the current model anyway, but..... the "average" user might have issues with this, I guess, and complain that their books aren't showing up when they copy the files over (oh, wait, or does the "average" user just use the crappy Borders or ADE software?)

really, as you suggest, the solution is to get ahold of the source code, and/or have Kobo work with OpenInkpot, so we can customize to our hearts desire!

[HamsterRage]

Originally Posted by mdurham

If they did this I would buy a Kobo immediately, the line spacing is just too big. My guess is they did it to make turning the page quicker, less work for the CPU.
Cheers, Mike

I only see that on the Kobo store purchased books, which you can't mess with because of the DRM. Books that come from other sources don't have that problem.