News from Bookeen about firmware upgrade

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by cmbs

Two minutes huh?

I begin to suspect you are on the Bookeen payroll, or maybe you're a stockholder. It would certainly explain a few things.

Yeah, right. In my dreams .

[tribble]

Originally Posted by cmbs

Right. Well if he's a plant, spreading the gospel of the greatness of bookeen all over mobile read land, he's not going to admit it now is he? Defending him doesn't change the facts, whatever they may be, regardless of how many of you choose to do it. (Nor does suspecting him.)

When he had his iLiad, he was like this aswell. And i envy him for beeing able to fall in love with devices that much. Maybe Bookeen can refund him his money for the CyBook for beeing a good sales representative.

But seriously. I suspect, that once a better machine comes on the market, Harry will go for it the same way as he did with the CyBook. But there isnt one at the moment. Lets wait and see, when we will see better readers out there.

[GeoffC]

It is not without its faults , but I like my Cybook Gen3 .

It's even better than HarryT led me to believe it would be .

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by tribble

When he had his iLiad, he was like this aswell. And i envy him for beeing able to fall in love with devices that much.

It's not really that. It's more a case that I've been reading eBooks for an awfully long time (some 20-odd years) and I like to focus on the positive things that each new generation of device brings with it. EVERY device has bugs; anyone who's ever written software knows that there's no such thing as "bug free" software, and Bookeen seem to be pretty proactive when it comes to fixing reported bugs.

When you compare the book readers we have today to what was available 10, or even 5, years ago, it's obvious just how far we've come and just how much better these device are than those were. Be aware of the bugs, sure, but concentrating on trivial faults and making them out to be HUGE, show-stopping "issues" just seems to me to be a rather "negative" outlook on life. Enjoy the device for what it CAN do, rather than moan about what it CAN'T.

That's my philosophy of life, anyway.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Mobi devices don't do pagination - it's simply an "estimate" based on file position. That's why on devices which DO show the page number, (eg the iLiad) you can reach the final displayed page number and still page forward a few times before you reach the end of the book. This has been reported several times on the iLiad forum. It's yet another reason that page numbering isn't terribly useful; they aren't "real" page numbers.

People here has claimed that page number is working. Nobody has said that the error in 20 pages is up to 6 pages which makes it not so useful.

[jgray]

Originally Posted by HarryT

When you compare the book readers we have today to what was available 10, or even 5, years ago, it's obvious just how far we've come and just how much better these device are than those were.

Yeah, those stone tablets were really slow on page updates

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by tompe

People here has claimed that page number is working. Nobody has said that the error in 20 pages is up to 6 pages which makes it not so useful.

Perhaps that's one reason why page numbers aren't shown? Maybe Bookeen decided that it's better not to show a page number at all than to show an inaccurate number, as some other versions of the Mobi reader do?

[Barcey]

Exactly. If they know they can't get it to work reliably I would rather they didn't attempt to implement it. I've had various PDA readers try to implement page numbers and I was much more frustrated with them then the Cybook. I ended up ignoring the pseudo page numbers and just using the progress bar anyway. Now the whole thing is like debating if there should be nipples on a batman costume.

[Ortep]

Originally Posted by Barcey

Now the whole thing is like debating if there should be nipples on a batman costume.

You mean there are no....

[slayda]

Originally Posted by lmarie

I always bookmark and return to the library before shutdown, and have never had any bookmark problems.

A single button for bookmark would be nice. Currently it requires at least three.

[cmbs]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Perhaps that's one reason why page numbers aren't shown? Maybe Bookeen decided that it's better not to show a page number at all than to show an inaccurate number, as some other versions of the Mobi reader do?

But they do show page numbers. What is the point of having the go to page number feature if it isn't accurate? I don't know the purpose of it at all at this point, it seems totally useless to me unless we can have page numbers shown in the book pages.

I thought they were calculating page numbers, because they supposedly are according to the go to page number feature. I think it's stubborn and stupid to then refuse to put page numbers on book pages. If I thought it was hard to calculate page numbers accurately, I'd be more understanding about why they're not available. But here I am thinking they are already doing it. Their own fake and useless feature that doesn't work correctly is making me think they are being stubborn and unresponsive to customer requests for no good reason.

I would really much prefer fewer features THAT WORK CORRECTLY over multiple features that don't. What is the point of multiple features that don't work correctly? The features are selling points, but they haven't taken the time to get them right. This, and the fact they keep focusing on selling rather than updating or customer service, tells me a lot about their business philosophy. Sales is their priority. Quality and customer satisfaction are way behind sales. I don't want to support a company who is selling a problem ridden product for way too much money with very poor customer service.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by cmbs

But they do show page numbers.

No, they don't. They show you an estimate of the total number of pages in the book, NOT the current page number (unless I've missed it somewhere?).

What is the point of having the go to page number feature if it isn't accurate? I don't know the purpose of it at all at this point, it seems totally useless to me unless we can have page numbers shown in the book pages.

I'd guess it's to give you a quick way of going roughly to a certain point in the book. Eg, if you want to go to a point 80% of the way through a 1000 page book, you'd say "goto page 800". How else would you make large jumps through a long book which perhaps lacked a table of contents?

I thought they were calculating page numbers, because they supposedly are according to the go to page number feature.

No, it's obvious from the fact that a "jump" destination always ends up at the top of a page that page numbers are NOT being calculated; they are just estimates based on (presumably) the length of the current page and the total file size.

If I thought it was hard to calculate page numbers accurately, I'd be more understanding about why they're not available. But here I am thinking they are already doing it. Their own fake and useless feature that doesn't work correctly is making me think they are being stubborn and unresponsive to customer requests for no good reason.

You have to lay the blame for this one at MobiPocket rather than Bookeen, I think. All versions of the Mobi reader have equally "fake" page numbers, and Bookeen license the Mobi reader code from Bookeen. Some versions of the Mobi reader display page numbers; others don't.

[tompe]

In the UI they should have called it something like "position" and not page number.

You have previously said that they do not licence the reader from Mobipocket but that they have written it themselves. So which statement is correct?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by tompe

In the UI they should have called it something like "position" and not page number.

You have previously said that they do not licence the reader from Mobipocket but that they have written it themselves. So which statement is correct?

No, what you're thinking of, I think, is that the Gen3's Mobi reader is not the portable Java version that Mobi wrote which, for example, the iLiad directly uses. The Gen3 doesn't have a JVM; its code is all written in C or C++, I think.

How much of the code of the Mobi reader that's in the Gen3 Bookeen wrote, and how much was supplied by MobiPocket I haven't the faintest idea, but I strongly suspect that a lot of the reader "internals" came straight from Mobi.

It's certainly licenced from Mobi - look at the copyright message on the "About" box.

[JSWolf]

Is the image bug fixed in rev 538?