Kobo Firmware 2.6.1

[Jeff1192]

Still no sign of this update for me. Weird because I've never had to wait this long for an update from Kobo.

[TechniSol]

Uh, maybe if you put down the lightsabre...

[taming]

Originally Posted by Ripplinger

Being somewhat still new to using the Kobo, what is it about epubs that you don't like? And what is it about kepubs that you prefer? It's a serious question for me, I might be missing something important and not even be aware of it.

The only differences I've noticed is the annoying title bar at the top for kepubs (which I hate). And that kepubs give you more Reading Life Stats, but for myself, the cutesiness of those stats wore off quickly the first time I had to do a factory restore and they all were reset to zero. So that makes them entirely useless to me even as a "cute-to-have but not needed item." And some of them just never update no matter what you do, even when using the kepub format (like the highlight award for me never updates).

I thought about not answering this even though I believe you are asking a serious question. I decided to answer, anyway, but I don't expect to engage in much dialog about what I have written. My blood pressure won't take a whole lot of tumult when I am doing something i do for fun and some of what i have to say may set some folks off.

Please remember that this is just one person's personal opinion.

I read almost entirely on an Aura these days. It replaced my glo, which my husband now uses. I may not be the right person to ask for a glo vs glo comparison.

From day one, the Aura had top titles. One of the first things I did was look at the difference in the amount of content displayed on the Aura with titles, and the Glo (which did not have them). Using the same book, same font, same size--a font and size I use routinely--I noticed that the Aura displayed 8 lines worth of glo content more than did the glo itself. This was when there were folks complaining that there was no more content on the Aura than they saw on other devices. I actually like the titles on the Aura--the page looks balanced, and I very often look at the menu that is invoked from the top title margin.

Using the kepub format, text almost always goes to the bottom of the page, at least it does using Georgia in the size I read at. I had not often run into epub pages where there is very little text on a page--and that was almost always on free books of the earlyish Gutenberg flavour. I did though notice that I fairly often had room for a few more lines of text on epubs.

I don't seem to have hyphenation issues in kepubs, even though I do not use a custom hyphenation dictionary (an option using the driver). Fonts in italics display properly in kepubs. In epubs, Avenir Next, Gil Sans, and Kobo Nickel display them (incorrrectly) as bold.

I like the extra information regarding the amount of time left to finish a chapter or finish the book on kepubs. I don't pay much attention to reading life. The time estimates give me more valuable information than page numbers. Page turns might be useful, but page numbers, on digital devices, not so much. The numbers have never been right for me--in part because I was reading on Kobo devices before there was a reading life, and of course because the sideloaded numbers do not survive a reformat (they do not sync). I have no interest at all in awards.

That's about it, I guess. It is why I prefer kepubs.

Do you happen to remember the post where I pointed folks to a presentation by Mike Serbinis? http://www.media-server.com/m/p/3yxbb6q3

In it, Serbinis divided Kobo customers into 7 categories (slide 29). The top two categories included 29% of their customers but accounted for 80% of their revenue. The two categories were:

• 15%--women and men who embrace both books and technology, with reading playing an active role in connecting with others. They are interested in reading leadership but less interested in mobile functionality.
• 14% On the move younger professionals who love mobile devices and all forms of entertainmnet. Interested in culture, reading and books.

By age alone, I would fall into a category of "older women (19%) who love two things: books and talking about books, but would prefer to borrow them from the library or a friend than pay"

Speculating a bit, I'm guessing that those top two categories (remember 80% of revenue) are mostly reading Kobo books in kepub format. I am just an outlier. I am willing to bet that Kobo is building mostly with the top two categories of readers in mind.

I just thought I would throw that into the mix...

Thanks for asking the question, Ripplinger!

[Ripplinger]

Thanks for the explanation, it really was a serious question for me and not intended to start any arguments about which is better... we each have our own preferences and that's perfectly fine.

I haven't run into many hyphenation problems, only rarely did a hyphen get placed at an incorrect position in a word (actually I can think of only 2 instances of it so far). Otherwise the Glo seems to do a decent job of hyphenation which avoids the big spaces between words on readers that don't hyphenate.

I may have to load another real kepub and look again. Or if I can use the Kobo extended drivers for kepubs, adding the same book to the reader in both formats might give me a better look at the differences.

[Lily7]

I have been trying to keep up with this thread in order to stay well informed but it is quite honestly information overload. My comprehension is not very sharp today, so I hope someone doesn't mind answering a couple of questions:

1. Is the current epub format about to go obsolete? I don't understand this epub2 vs epub3 and ACCESS renderer stuff. WAY over my head. I guess I just want some reassurance that I haven't built up a huge collection of epub ebooks only to have their formats go obsolete!

2. This latest FW release, again information overload. I read the gist of the pros and cons and bugs that have been posted but so far all I've gleaned is that there is a space at the top that most don't like. Are there any common major usability problems with this release? I can't decide whether or not to upgrade from 2.5.1, which has been my favorite release and the one I consider most stable so far. Help?

[Rev. Bob]

Originally Posted by RZetlin

It's worst for the standard epub format. Images do not show up at all.

Not true. Some images (namely, PNGs) don't show up. I've got 2.6.1 on my Glo right now, though, and JPEGs are showing up just fine on the sideloaded EPUB I'm reading.

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by RZetlin

I got the 2.6.1 Update for the my Aura today.

I don't like this update - you can no longer display images in full screen in the epub format.

I can't even 2.52 although I have synced 6 times. Not that I want it, but seems strange

helen

[PeterT]

It makes no difference how many times you sync. Until the update is made available for your particular serial #, and for the re-seller you bought from, the only way to get the update is to do the manual process documented in the Kobo Developers sub-forum.

[Danger]

Originally Posted by Lily7

2. This latest FW release, again information overload. I read the gist of the pros and cons and bugs that have been posted but so far all I've gleaned is that there is a space at the top that most don't like. Are there any common major usability problems with this release? I can't decide whether or not to upgrade from 2.5.1, which has been my favorite release and the one I consider most stable so far. Help?

Aside from the extra space at the top honestly, I actually quite like this version. So far I haven't seen any bugs that make me want to pull my hair out. The only bugs so far that I have noticed is PNG images do not show up, the chess game has a tantrum if you are winning. The biggest change has been the home screen. Takes a little getting used to but is actually better than the previous one in my opinion.

[aceflor]

Originally Posted by taming

I thought about not answering this even though I believe you are asking a serious question. I decided to answer, anyway, but I don't expect to engage in much dialog about what I have written. My blood pressure won't take a whole lot of tumult when I am doing something i do for fun and some of what i have to say may set some folks off.

Please remember that this is just one person's personal opinion.

I read almost entirely on an Aura these days. It replaced my glo, which my husband now uses. I may not be the right person to ask for a glo vs glo comparison.

From day one, the Aura had top titles. One of the first things I did was look at the difference in the amount of content displayed on the Aura with titles, and the Glo (which did not have them). Using the same book, same font, same size--a font and size I use routinely--I noticed that the Aura displayed 8 lines worth of glo content more than did the glo itself. This was when there were folks complaining that there was no more content on the Aura than they saw on other devices. I actually like the titles on the Aura--the page looks balanced, and I very often look at the menu that is invoked from the top title margin.

Using the kepub format, text almost always goes to the bottom of the page, at least it does using Georgia in the size I read at. I had not often run into epub pages where there is very little text on a page--and that was almost always on free books of the earlyish Gutenberg flavour. I did though notice that I fairly often had room for a few more lines of text on epubs.

I don't seem to have hyphenation issues in kepubs, even though I do not use a custom hyphenation dictionary (an option using the driver). Fonts in italics display properly in kepubs. In epubs, Avenir Next, Gil Sans, and Kobo Nickel display them (incorrrectly) as bold.

I like the extra information regarding the amount of time left to finish a chapter or finish the book on kepubs. I don't pay much attention to reading life. The time estimates give me more valuable information than page numbers. Page turns might be useful, but page numbers, on digital devices, not so much. The numbers have never been right for me--in part because I was reading on Kobo devices before there was a reading life, and of course because the sideloaded numbers do not survive a reformat (they do not sync). I have no interest at all in awards.

That's about it, I guess. It is why I prefer kepubs.

Do you happen to remember the post where I pointed folks to a presentation by Mike Serbinis? http://www.media-server.com/m/p/3yxbb6q3

In it, Serbinis divided Kobo customers into 7 categories (slide 29). The top two categories included 29% of their customers but accounted for 80% of their revenue. The two categories were:

• 15%--women and men who embrace both books and technology, with reading playing an active role in connecting with others. They are interested in reading leadership but less interested in mobile functionality.
• 14% On the move younger professionals who love mobile devices and all forms of entertainmnet. Interested in culture, reading and books.

By age alone, I would fall into a category of "older women (19%) who love two things: books and talking about books, but would prefer to borrow them from the library or a friend than pay"

Speculating a bit, I'm guessing that those top two categories (remember 80% of revenue) are mostly reading Kobo books in kepub format. I am just an outlier. I am willing to bet that Kobo is building mostly with the top two categories of readers in mind.

I just thought I would throw that into the mix...

Thanks for asking the question, Ripplinger!

This makes sense, and I understand why you prefer kepubs. There was no need to worry about your blood pressure.

I do prefer them too as a format, I even use the kobo touch extended plugins, I don't mind the title but in the font I use, which is not one of the original ones, I end up losing a fair amount of reading space. But as a format, and for my books, so far, kepubs has had a better rendering than epubs. I would not generalize and say that kepub is the best though. Most of my books are mobi or azw anyway, so I have to convert them, and the conversion to kepub works a tad better for those books than the conversion to epub. I hope the nuance is clear.

Regarding the Aura... well, it ain't bad, but it ain't the best either. I don't read that much on it, only at night, during the day I prefer by far the mini. I can't help but feeling that while the Mini was good value for the money, the Aura is exactly the contrary.

[roger64]

Originally Posted by aceflor

But as a format, and for my books, so far, kepubs has had a better rendering than epubs.

This is not a surprise. This has nothing to do with the format. Kobo rendering for the EPUB format is just sub-par, plainly poor, riddled with longstanding bugs. If I cripple you before starting, there is no surprise if I shall probably win the race...

"Kobo, with limited resources, is bracing mostly for the incoming EPUB3 support... ta la la, ta la la..." How do you say "langue de bois" in English?

Out of the MOBI world, I guess that the vast majority of ebooks are in EPUB2 format but who cares... Not Kobo for sure.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by roger64

This is not a surprise. This has nothing to do with the format. Kobo rendering for the EPUB format is just sub-par, plainly poor, riddled with longstanding bugs. If I cripple you before starting, there is no surprise if I shall probably win the race...

"Kobo, with limited resources, is bracing mostly for the incoming EPUB3 support... ta la la, ta la la..." How do you say "langue de bois" in English?

Out of the MOBI world, I guess that the vast majority of ebooks are in EPUB2 format but who cares... Not Kobo for sure.

While I agree with taming, that Kobo are looking at full epub3 support, I think the problem with epub2 is as much Adobe as Kobo. The epub2 reader is based on Adobe's SDK. From what I can tell, Adobe are no longer developing this. That make it harder for the ereader vendors to fix problems. Because of this, and the desire for epub3 support, I think that Kobo have decided to move ACCESS as the only reader application. The number of people sideloading epub2 as kepubs, demonstrates how well it handles epub2. If they are doing this, then fixing bugs in the current epub2 reader doesn't make sense. We can only hope they hurry up and complete the transition.

This is all speculation on my part. I have no special access to info or relationship with Kobo.

[Terisa de morgan]

Originally Posted by roger64

This is not a surprise. This has nothing to do with the format. Kobo rendering for the EPUB format is just sub-par, plainly poor, riddled with longstanding bugs. If I cripple you before starting, there is no surprise if I shall probably win the race...

It's a way to see it. I don't find epub rendering worse at Kobo than at Sony. My books? Perhaps. For me, the difference between kepub and epub is not really the rendering: I have widows/orphans by deault, no hyphenate, default font... So, the big bugs people talk about aren't there for me. And, in this aspect, I don't think I'm the exception.

[samhy]

Originally Posted by Jeff1192

Still no sign of this update for me. Weird because I've never had to wait this long for an update from Kobo.

In the past when a firmware was released on, say, a Thursday or Friday, I used to get it in the middle of the next week (on Friday at the very least). Just once it was available for me a couple of days after the original release.
In that case it might be the release had been put on hold to give time to fix things, though

Originally Posted by Ripplinger

Being somewhat still new to using the Kobo, what is it about epubs that you don't like? And what is it about kepubs that you prefer? It's a serious question for me, I might be missing something important and not even be aware of it.

I agree with taming and aceflor and would like to add the footnotes management

[mbovenka]

Originally Posted by samhy

I agree with taming and aceflor and would like to add the footnotes management

Yep, same here. The way footnotes are handled in kepubs is a biggie for me.