Kindle firmware version 5.7.2

[Pyjam]

Is it now possible to have different settings for each collections? Some sorted by last opened, some sorted by authors, etc.

Those new icons are... not very pretty…

[Offie]

Originally Posted by Rizla

Amazon is "damned" because it forces updates on users. It does it without informing users or asking for their permission. Amazon should allow users to opt out of the update, or better still, allow users to downgrade to previous FW versions.

What I would like is more options to choose. There's not enough room for customization - and almost never has been, with kindles. Why couldn't we have an option between two types of list views. An option that would let us decide if we want little dots under book titles or actual letters and numbers wouldn't hurt anyone or be complicated, would it?

Then there's plain idiocy, that has nothing to do with tastes. I maintain that writing "collection" under something that is so very obviously a collection is nothing but a hindrance. Should we write 'book' under every book file then? Was anyone confused with collections before they added the word 'collection' in capital letters? They were in bold, with an item number underneath; they didn't look like book files. If 1% was confused it should still be the 99% who knew to differentiate their collections from their books that should have prevailed. That kind of little thing just annoys me.
Same as back when they warned us every time we added a non-amazon book to a collection that it wouldn't be synced to the cloud and then warning again when confirming. It was terribly annoying, and they ended up changing it back and warning only once. Point is, sometimes they make unwise update choices, and we have to deal with the complications that they entail while we'd have been very fine without that.

[Zilov]

Originally Posted by tono1020

On my PW2 (with firmware 5.7.2) it works exactly the same as before: buttons Highlight, Note, Share and Search appears when you select text. Highlights and Notes are stored in My Clippings.txt as before this update.
I'm talking about sideloaded books.

Hmm...Such a strange thing. I've checked out again:

mobi via send-to-kindle - it's OK
AZW3 via USB - Nope. Just nothing appears after text selection and touch anywhere deselects the text.

I have KPW2 too.

[tono1020]

Originally Posted by Zilov

Hmm...Such a strange thing. I've checked out again:

mobi via send-to-kindle - it's OK
AZW3 via USB - Nope. Just nothing appears after text selection and touch anywhere deselects the text.

I have KPW2 too.

Strange indeed.
You should see the ribbon with those buttons above or below selected text.
I checked AZW3 file sideloaded via USB with Calibre.

[shalym]

Originally Posted by tono1020

Strange indeed.
You should see the ribbon with those buttons above or below selected text.
I checked AZW3 file sideloaded via USB with Calibre.

It also works for me on sideloaded books. Zilov, have you restarted your Kindle since the upgrade?

Shari

[nixkalo]

Originally Posted by irreld

How did you find that? The jailbreak survived the update?

No, in fact my PW3 is not jailbroken (yet?). But kindletool allowed me to take a look at what's inside the update.

[uncletoma]

My 2 cents: i like this update, new home screen is pretty cute, no differences on reading experience with my PW3 (this can be crap or good, your personal matter), no problems till now.
BTW: i use my PW only for reading books, no notes, i've enough books (icons are till the same) on it so i don't try to sent other books sideload or via email.
I agree with ppl that like an option "don't update my kindle" (after all the solution is "airplane mode"... crap one ) and this is first update for my kindle

[Axanar]

Hi I just registered here to jump into this conversation.

I found a bunch of strange bugs with this update and would like to share them with you to receive feedback whether I am the only one affected by them. I already forwarded them to Kindle Support - but received the usual automated replies like - reset your device. Anyways, here we go:

1) The new percentage display that got attached to the book cover has issues. If you open a bunch of purchased books from Amazon Store and swipe to the cover (the true very first page) and then close the book again - the percentage displays 100% rather than 0%. Books confirmed: Amazon Kindle Manual 5the version, Technical Analysis of the Financial Market and plenty of other books. Simply open the book and swipe to the cover.

Edit: Nearly forgot! Do the same again with other books. Sometimes it only shows 1% - which also is strange if you have a book that has over 1000 pages. So mathematically 1% of 1000 pages would be page 10. But the cover is definately not the 10th page of the book.

2) I also realized that the percentage that gets shown inside the book (you can select an option how far you are in the book) differs from what is shown in the books cover percentage display. I have a book that reads inside (bottom left) 23% read... On the cover it shows 26% read.

3) I also figured out that quite often when going into the Amazon Shop (by clicking the shop button) that the filter functions won't really work. When opening the kindle shop, go to "kindle-news" and then select filters and inside there press "sort", "sub category", "reviews" and "release date" (I use the german version, so the correct terms might be different - please forgive me). So pressing these buttons sometimes does nothing. No sort, no accessing the sub categories etc.. It also causes the device to - reset every now and then. This also happened with 5.6.5.

4) Again the same as 3). Rather than resetting. Press "sorting" in the filter menu and a new dialog pops up. My dialog here has a white area below it. Let me show this with a pictures.

Kindle Dialog error

5) I also had plenty of random crashes with 5.7.2 today. I use the old "Books list". You know where you have 6 Book Covers on the screen and you can swipe through the library. I have around 40 Books installed. Spread over 8 pages. When I swipe through the pages I had a few crashes where the entire Kindle device had to reset.

Looks like there are still some issues inside this release.

[Solarin]

Originally Posted by Offie

What I would like is more options to choose. There's not enough room for customization - and almost never has been, with kindles. Why couldn't we have an option between two types of list views. An option that would let us decide if we want little dots under book titles or actual letters and numbers wouldn't hurt anyone or be complicated, would it?

I think the issue that all technology companies face is that everyone wants everything to be an option. We see it with smartphones where 100 different people can have 100 different ideas for what features they want to be opt-in or opt-out.

The difference with kindles though, is that most users spend 99% of their time reading on the kindle. Dots vs. percentages in the list view is something that most users honestly would not care about. Amazon is probably just trying to make it the most user friendly as possible, while also keeping the options menu less complicated as possible.

[haydnfan]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Thanks. I rather like that; the "x% read" is a lot more useful than the row of dots on the current list view.

??? This makes no sense. If a quarter of the dots are filled you are a quarter way through the book. If two thirds of the dots are filled you are two thirds through the book. If there are alot of dots, it's a long book. If there are a few dots, it's a short book. It gives you the size of the book and how far you are into it at a glance. How is that in anyway not useful information?

[Axanar]

Originally Posted by Solarin

Dots vs. percentages in the list view is something that most users honestly would not care about.

Unless if the new percentage view has horrible issues. Specially if a new unread book that only got opened once and swiped to the cover at the beginning starts showing 100% read. Or showing 1% (at the cover again) on a 1000+ pages book (which means "you are somewhere on page 10"). Or shows 26% read on the book cover but inside the book on the bottom left 23% read. On a 1000 pages book 23% vs. 26% makes some big differences. Still cosmetical but annoying (specially the 100% and 1% issue).

Read more on my previous post

[Atunah]

Originally Posted by Axanar

Unless if the new percentage view has horrible issues. Specially if a new unread book that only got opened once and swiped to the cover at the beginning starts showing 100% read. Or showing 1% (at the cover again) on a 1000+ pages book (which means "you are somewhere on page 10"). Or shows 26% read on the book cover but inside the book on the bottom left 23% read. On a 1000 pages book 23% vs. 26% makes some big differences. Still cosmetical but annoying (specially the 100% and 1% issue).

Read more on my previous post

I am not having any of these issues you mentioned in your previous post. No rebooting, no weird thing going o with the percentage either. I have about 300 books on my Voyage.
No issues with store filtering either.

You said you already had some of these issues with the previous version as far as rebooting, so there might be other issues going on. I have had no issues rebooting with the previous version either. I have had my Voyage for a year now.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by Axanar

Unless if the new percentage view has horrible issues. Specially if a new unread book that only got opened once and swiped to the cover at the beginning starts showing 100% read. Or showing 1% (at the cover again) on a 1000+ pages book (which means "you are somewhere on page 10"). Or shows 26% read on the book cover but inside the book on the bottom left 23% read. On a 1000 pages book 23% vs. 26% makes some big differences. Still cosmetical but annoying (specially the 100% and 1% issue).

Read more on my previous post

Well there is no 0% so 1% makes sense.
On the 23 versus 26 percent are you looking at a 1000 page book?
Or are you looking at a small book?
Give me the title of the book you are actually looking at.

[barryem]

I just opened a book where I'd looked at the first page or two. It said before I opened it that I'd read 2%. I paged back to the cover and closed it and now it said 0%.

That seems to work okay. I still miss the dots showing me the relative length of the book though.

Barry

[Axanar]

Hi! Thanks for the reply. Man I am a bit frustrated by this update. I do like the overall changes. But some stuff they better not have touched.

Originally Posted by Atunah

You said you already had some of these issues with the previous version as far as rebooting, so there might be other issues going on.

Well I have the Kindle Paperwhite 2 (6th Gen). On the older Updates and on rare occasions the Beta-Browser crashed when dealing with bigger webpages. And sometimes the Kindle Store crashed on exactly that one menu entry.

The menu issue (the above screenshot) might not affect you because you seem to be getting US content. If you look inside the Kindle folder under the .active_somewhat_blah folder, you see as store folder and if you go inside RemoteContent, then you see some *.html files with plenty of javascript (?) magic inside. This stuff is being downloaded from the Kindle Store.

Even if you delete the entire store folder and restart your Kindle, the content is being pulled down once again. I am quite sure, that the javascript code inside might be causing this issue. You might have noticed that the Kindle Store often shows different content, different clickable content and menu entries. From time to time they even re-structure the Store.

I bet during translation of the pages that someone has blown up some metadata inside there. It could also be that the javascript engine triggers some functionality (like umlauts) that it can't deal with and thus cause the entire thing to reboot. Though I believe the underlaying Kernel is Linux and thus under no circumstances should cause a reboot. It only affects that one menu entry.

Another theory could be that the compiler used (or compile options) might render wrong CPU mnemonic (machine code) that may (in this particular situation) trigger some crappy code segments and causes the crash. I would be able to debug it (I am programmer and Linux Kernel Driver developer). But I don't intend to waste my time with a reading device.

With the 5.7.2 update things got horrible here. I was laying in the bed a few moments ago and read that particular book ...

• Geldanlage fundiert

... sadly I gave up after a while, after realizing that they also changed the appearance of the fonts (somehow they look thinner now - which causes a lot of pain for me to read the words (I am short sighted)).

After closing the book the entire Kindle rebooted again.

This is now the 5th or 6th reboot because of crashes after I updated to 5.7.2 earlier today (german time). Some crashes happened when swiping through my book library just by changing one page to another (from the 8 pages I have), one crash happened in the Kindle Store and some crashes just by reading books (swiping and closing).

Now from the "major" update perspective. We don't really know what they changed. Maybe a new compiler was used, maybe they switched from using gtk2 to gtk3 (this explains using the new symbolic icons), maybe a new kernel was used. Maybe simply stupid programming issues (like memory leaks and so on). Who knows.

The percentage issue I explain after the following quote:

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Well there is no 0% so 1% makes sense.
On the 23 versus 26 percent are you looking at a 1000 page book?
Or are you looking at a small book?
Give me the title of the book you are actually looking at.

Please look above. I was referring to the book above. The book showed me 23% inside the book and had 26% outside printed on the cover. That book has about 300 pages all in all. The 1000 pages book that I was mentioning was just a theoretical thing. Let's pretend you may have a 1000 pages book installed. Then 23% of 1000 pages result a different value (page 187) than 25% of 1000 pages (page 200). In theory the values differ by 13 pages.

Now the books that show me 100% when I swipe to the cover (within the opened book) and then close the book:

• Aktienanleihen
• Easy Turkish
• Erstellung eines Kindle-Buchs
• Handbuch der Indizes
• Handbuch der Rohstoffe
• Kompaktratgeber Immobilieninvestment
• Leitfaden Businessplan
• Technische Analyse der Finanzmärkte

Thanks for the help. I will reply tomorrow. Good night!