IF you could design the user interface for the next Kobo Firmware

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

What is this glacial processing of new books.you speak of. I only have the glacial opening of the shelves problem.

Aura process 1000 new books pretty fast, actually faster than My Sony, one of the few things it does better. Mini maybe a minute or two, still faster than the Sony. Is this glacial processing of new books a new thing?

Helen

As near as I can tell from several posts, Kobo is now to blame for the slowness when you use the jgoguen's KoboTouchExtended plugin to convert thousands of ebooks from epub to pseudo-kepub before copying them to your ereader.

As I've said several times, I've abandoned shelves in favour of search. A heck of a lot less work and faster than building a few hundred shelves and re-adding the books to them everytime I do a factory reset.

Regards,
David

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by DNSB

As near as I can tell from several posts, Kobo is now to blame for the slowness when you use the jgoguen's KoboTouchExtended plugin to convert thousands of ebooks from epub to pseudo-kepub before copying them to your ereader.

As I've said several times, I've abandoned shelves in favour of search. A heck of a lot less work and faster than building a few hundred shelves and re-adding the books to them everytime I do a factory reset.

Regards,
David

As I have said before I will try the search at least 10 times. So far it isn't doing it for me.

Are you actually rebuilding and re-adding a few hundred shelves every time you do a factory reset? I've never done a factory reset, but I assume that if I did that the calibre shelves would be re-added by calibre. Is this not true? Now I am really confused.

Anyway back to the search thing. Last night I wanted to read a book by Robert B. parker so I typed in Pa and a list appeared. I was distracted by a long list of books that had Pa in the title. So I looked at a couple. Then I tried again. Got to Park and still no Robert B. Parker. Got to Parker and still no Robert B. Parker. Maybe it was a dozen pages further or I had to start with Robert B. ?

So I did it the old fashioned slow (on the Kobo) way and got the book. What am I missing.

PS as I am obviously doing something wrong I am only counting this as one search although I searched at least 4 times and I changed to library each and every time.

Helen

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Ken Maltby

Searching pretty much requires that you have a specific thing you are looking for.

Browsing is similar to searching but with no specific object as your goal.

If I always know the next book I wish to read, then all I would need is a search tool.

Most of the time I have no particular book in mind and want to browse through defined listings of books, to see what might meet my needs and mood. Being able to browse through a listing of all the "Mystery" ebooks I have on hand, or all the "SciFi", or all the "Fantasy", or all the "PolyTicks", or all the "Comedy", or all the ebooks in any of over 50 catagories, is not something that you can replace with a search function.

Hmmm... I generally search by author, series or book title. Since I have over 1400 books that would qualify as fantasy or science fiction, those would be little use for displaying content. The mystery section takes up another 200 books with about 40 books that are various oddments -- Travel? "In A Sunburned Country" has a series tag of travel -- Calibre really doesn't care what I used for series and they are searchable. Basically, I bulk metadata edited all the travel books into that series, ditto for comedy, horror and so on.

As the example I gave theonna, search for Eric Flint books is far faster and easier than finding all the books for which he was an author, co-author, editor or contributed a short story. Anthologies are fun in that I add the various authors as authors but use the editor as the modification on the author line. Esther Friesner and her Chicks series for instance -- if I want to find a story written by Roger Zelazny in that series, the search is pretty trivial. Yes, titles like "Chicks 'n Chained Males" or "The Chick Is In The Mail" may be politically incorrect but they're also something that tickles my sense of humour and most of the stories are pretty decent as well as humourous.

Regards,
David

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by DNSB

As I've said several times, I've abandoned shelves in favour of search. A heck of a lot less work and faster than building a few hundred shelves and re-adding the books to them everytime I do a factory reset.

Regards,
David

PS sort of
Do I understand that you abandoned shelves because they were not working right, and one should just take another approach as they will probably not ever work right.

Or are you saying search is actually better than shelves. I seem to recall that you managed to put a bunch of books on your home screen in reverse series order, so you could access the series easily. It all seems a PITA so far but I will persevere

Helen

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

As I have said before I will try the search at least 10 times. So far it isn't doing it for me.

Are you actually rebuilding and re-adding a few hundred shelves every time you do a factory reset? I've never done a factory reset, but I assume that if I did that the calibre shelves would be re-added by calibre. Is this not true? Now I am really confused.

The shelves are re-added from Kobo's servers as part of the synchronization after the factory reset. Any sideloaded content needs to be re-added and I had issues several times with Calibre adding the books and then having to manually correct the problems so finally just gave up and removed all shelves. The issues with Calibre may be corrected since this was quite a few versions back for the driver but I don't see any need to revive shelves at this time.

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

Anyway back to the search thing. Last night I wanted to read a book by Robert B. parker so I typed in Pa and a list appeared. I was distracted by a long list of books that had Pa in the title. So I looked at a couple. Then I tried again. Got to Park and still no Robert B. Parker. Got to Parker and still no Robert B. Parker. Maybe it was a dozen pages further or I had to start with Robert B. ?

How many hits did you get for parker? On mine, I get to park and I have 3 choices (Mansfield Park, Sparkling Wines of Ontario and K. J. Parker) with the park bolded in each result. Now I'm going to have to open Sparkling Wines of Ontario and find out what it's doing on my Kobo. I don't remember ever reading it.

Just tried a search on the Kobo bookstore using parker. Slower than molasses but it did come up results. The first two on the first page were not Robert B. Parker but the next 4 on the page were and I didn't feel up to scrolling through the full 34 pages of results. Changing to robert b. parker gave me 14 pages of results with 12 that were for Robert B. Parker and two pages of results that made you go "where's that come from?" Persuasion and Emma (Illustrated) by Jane Austen? The Art of War by Sun Tzu? The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling?

Regards,
David

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

PS sort of
Do I understand that you abandoned shelves because they were not working right, and one should just take another approach as they will probably not ever work right.

Or are you saying search is actually better than shelves. I seem to recall that you managed to put a bunch of books on your home screen in reverse series order, so you could access the series easily. It all seems a PITA so far but I will persevere

Helen

Basically correct, I gave up on shelves -- slowness, pain to resetup, etc. The basic idea may be good but when you start getting a large of shelves and books on multiple shelves, it just doesn't seem to work properly. For the reverse series, I just did a search on the series and then opened the books from last to first. Just handier for me to have them all on the home screen.

Regards,
David

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Actually, in theonna's .pdf example, the dot on the j in jumped overlapped with the descender on the j in several of his examples.

I realised that when you commented. But there wasn't enough overlapping to bother me much.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by davidfor

I realised that when you commented. But there wasn't enough overlapping to bother me much.

In that short example no. Stretch that over an entire book's worth of text and add a few diacriticals that get munged. In the words of Samuel Goldwyn, include me out. Perhaps I might be a trifle prejudiced since there are likely not all that many people reading this thread who ever used an ETAION SHRDLU keyboard and used real lead (well, type metal) for leading. Ah, those were the days when men were men and Linotypes were capable of spitting molten metal.

Regards,
David

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by DNSB

The shelves are re-added from Kobo's servers as part of the synchronization after the factory reset. Any sideloaded content needs to be re-added and I had issues several times with Calibre adding the books and then having to manually correct the problems so finally just gave up and removed all shelves. The issues with Calibre may be corrected since this was quite a few versions back for the driver but I don't see any need to revive shelves at this time.



How many hits did you get for parker? On mine, I get to park and I have 3 choices (Mansfield Park, Sparkling Wines of Ontario and K. J. Parker) with the park bolded in each result. Now I'm going to have to open Sparkling Wines of Ontario and find out what it's doing on my Kobo. I don't remember ever reading it.

Just tried a search on the Kobo bookstore using parker. Slower than molasses but it did come up results. The first two on the first page were not Robert B. Parker but the next 4 on the page were and I didn't feel up to scrolling through the full 34 pages of results. Changing to robert b. parker gave me 14 pages of results with 12 that were for Robert B. Parker and two pages of results that made you go "where's that come from?" Persuasion and Emma (Illustrated) by Jane Austen? The Art of War by Sun Tzu? The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling?

Regards,
David

I don't know how many hits, just went to the second or 3rd page and gave up

My calibre shelves work fine. I bought the mini in Oct I think and they worked right of the bat flawlessly IMO. I didn't do the #myshelves thing, just used the same setup/plugboard as I was using for Sony and it worked. (Thanks to Davidfor and PeterT I assume). This was from a factory reset state (or factory fresh state) I think as there was no firmware installed when I registered with the Kobo Desktop.

I immediately put on 800 books and all was well until I added a a collection of all books and genre collections. Then it took a long time to open the shelves. Close to a minute IIRC. So I eventually figured out that the large amounts of books caused the problem and got the time down to ~ 11 seconds. Still to long but doable.

But now I have the supposedly faster Aura and I think about 1800 books with only one largish collection of around 90 books (was 93 but I have read and deleted 5 or 6) and the time is over 90 seconds to even open the shelf list. No big deal you say, but if I open the wrong shelf or change my mind, then I have to wait another 90 seconds. Browsing through 10 shelves takes 15 minutes of overhead just for shelf opening time, or back button time. Then I have to select the shelf by guessing the page number or swiping one page at a time.

So instead of calming down to a good sleeping state with a good book I become plumb full of hate.

The search thing could work if I knew exactly the book I wanted or was even sure it was reliable (low Kobo confidence level here).

Yet I persevere. Maybe I just won't finally admit to myself how foolish both my purchase decisions were. Fool me twice eh.

I kind of admire your attitude in that you seem to feel a PITA workaround is better than a functioning device, and almost take pride in substandard conditions, (do you have an outhouse in your backyard I just am less able to perceive the benefits of hardships and don't truly believe that that which doesn't kill us makes us stronger. I get no joy for making up excuses for inadequacies.

Helen

Helen

[TechniSol]

I was referring to how long it takes when books are newly placed on the SDHC as well as the shelves. I don't have that large a collection on my readers -nor what I'd consider a great delay, but others have posted significant processing delays with larger collections being read in initially and building shelves, or so I believe. If incorrect, my apologies to the developers.

I also got a good laugh out of the notion that Calibre processing time to convert to kepubs had anything to do with Kobo input processing or database processing time lags for shelf creation.

[theonna]

Originally Posted by TechniSol

I also got a good laugh out of the notion that Calibre processing time to convert to kepubs had anything to do with Kobo input processing or database processing time lags for shelf creation.

It is not funny. Good thing is that with new firmware, Kobo( not Calibre) takes 20min to process 1.8K books, it took it about 50 min before. So nothing stellar, but I am happy it has been improved. As far as taking time to process books for shelves with Calibre, it is still not funny, because Calibre is the only way to do it, because there is no way you can do 1.8K manually. I much rather not even use Calibre at all. And I did not need to use Calibre with any other reader, just may be for occasional conversion.
For user interface-
I wish to have full control over line height, margins and top and bottom status lines. Don't point to Adobe for orphans and widows, just fix it already.
Full user control over online updates, synchronization, tile placement and content of the home screen.
File manager. File Manager. File Manager!!!!!
May be if I repeat it often enough, someone will actually listen.

[PeterT]

@Theonna: I hate to say it, but the chances of seeing Kobo supply a browser interface for Kobo is identical to the chances of Microsoft releasing a security patch for Windows for Workgroups 3.1.1..

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

But now I have the supposedly faster Aura and I think about 1800 books with only one largish collection of around 90 books (was 93 but I have read and deleted 5 or 6) and the time is over 90 seconds to even open the shelf list. No big deal you say, but if I open the wrong shelf or change my mind, then I have to wait another 90 seconds. Browsing through 10 shelves takes 15 minutes of overhead just for shelf opening time, or back button time. Then I have to select the shelf by guessing the page number or swiping one page at a time.

You will be happy to hear that things have improved with 2.6.1. On my Touch, I have 1300 books and a shelf for each series plus a few others. That gives 30 pages of shelves. Most have less than five books, but one shelf has 1031 (all the ePubs) and one has 263 (all the books that have a PDF format). Opening the shelf list now takes about 25 seconds. Hopefully it will be better on the Aura.

It still isn't great, but better than before.

[theonna]

Originally Posted by PeterT

@Theonna: I hate to say it, but the chances of seeing Kobo supply a browser interface for Kobo is identical to the chances of Microsoft releasing a security patch for Windows for Workgroups 3.1.1..

As if the file browser is just as old and useless as Windows for Workgroups 3.1.1.
Or they have efficient ways to manage collection organization?
Or they can otherwise handle search for, lets say, books in Hindu?
Or, just may be, they have multi layered book shelves?

Without file browser or it's emulation I am afraid to say, that the answer to all of those will be no as well.

Of course, there are about billion Chinese, another billion of Indians, half a billion of Russians, but who cares about them, not significant market, right?

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by theonna

It is not funny. Good thing is that with new firmware, Kobo( not Calibre) takes 20min to process 1.8K books, it took it about 50 min before. So nothing stellar, but I am happy it has been improved. As far as taking time to process books for shelves with Calibre, it is still not funny, because Calibre is the only way to do it, because there is no way you can do 1.8K manually. I much rather not even use Calibre at all. And I did not need to use Calibre with any other reader, just may be for occasional conversion.

You don't need calibre for this either. In fact, by choosing the extended driver, you have specifically chosen to use an unsupported feature of the reader (sideloading kepubs). The rest, shelves or even just getting books on the devices, calibre is the simplest way to do it as it is for a lot of the other readers.

For user interface-
I wish to have full control over line height, margins and top and bottom status lines. Don't point to Adobe for orphans and widows, just fix it already.

The problem is that everyone disagrees over whether these are bugs or not. As far as I can tell, the line height, orphans and widows and margins seem to be working according to the CSS and epub specs. Doing something else would get complaints in other ways. About the only one I agree on, is that the line height choices they have are wrong. The range should be shifted so that the smallest is at the most 1.0.

Full user control over online updates, synchronization, tile placement and content of the home screen.
File manager. File Manager. File Manager!!!!!
May be if I repeat it often enough, someone will actually listen.

As to the status line and other things, Kobo are the designers of the software, and have decided that is the way to go. Making a suggesting is reasonable, but demanding is not. But, the updates I definitely agree with. Telling me there is an update with a "now or later prompt" is a reasonable thing. FW2.6.1 give me a lot more control over the home screen than I had before. Of course it could it be improved, and maybe it will. I'm not commenting on the file manager.

But, how do you not have full control over synchronization? It only happens when you trigger it: push the button or connect to the PC and use the desktop app. You don't want to synchonize, then don't. And from the fact you are sideloading books so many books, it doesn't sound like you need to sync at all.