Can Kobo Mini be ROOTED to provide...

Sigh. I wrote out a huge reply, then decided I should probably practice what I preach. There are plenty of threads discussing the drawbacks of Kobo after all.

But filmo is quite correct. There is no need to root a Kobo. There are guides on how to modify it on the wiki, and there is a thread on how to setup the development tools in the Kobo Developer subforum. So the option of creating a reader that is better for the needs of the more demanding of us are out there.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

My Cowon J3 (not a cheap MP3 player) does support directories. So there going your cheap (with directories) vs not cheap (without directories) theory.

Nope. I was comparing the unit that is still the market leader for portable music players. Apple doesn't seem to have any problems with not having a file browser nor do I hear screams from frustrated users demanding one.

Regards,
David

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Given the numbers I've seen on the web, it would appear that Kobo is succeeding in attracting customers around the world. I'd agree that they do not seem that interested in the US market. Why waste your time and money fighting Amazon and Barnes & Noble in their backyard? The world wide market numbers give Kobo around 25% of ereader sales with Amazon at 51%, Sony at 10% and B &N at 6%. Kobo is also one of the few ereader vendors who have increased their sales in a market where the analysts are claiming that total sales are dropping and will continue to drop.

I'm curious where you saw these numbers given that Amazon doesn't release numbers. So there's no way these numbers could be accurate. What they are are a guess. They've always been a guess and always will be. I'm not blaming you for posting the numbers. I'm blaming the source(s).

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Nope. I was comparing the unit that is still the market leader for portable music players. Apple doesn't seem to have any problems with not having a file browser nor do I hear screams from frustrated users demanding one.

Regards,
David

But you do have one user that would like to have more standard file formats and easy playlist creation. I find iTunes on an iPhone to be meh.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I'm curious where you saw these numbers given that Amazon doesn't release numbers. So there's no way these numbers could be accurate. What they are are a guess. They've always been a guess and always will be. I'm not blaming you for posting the numbers. I'm blaming the source(s).

The numbers came from 3 sources. They had pretty close agreement on the numbers. Given they were quoting total sales and then breaking out the various vendors, they could easily have said, any left over devices are sold by Amazon. Some of the figures I've seen were arrived at by using the sales of eInk screens as the basis for estimating how many ereaders were being made. But then statistics are so much fun. Give statisticians enough paper and pencils and they'll prove anything.

As for not releasing sales figures, it appears that if you checked the British Parliament's web site, you could get the UK sales numbers for Amazon. Your public pounds at work. One site compared those figures to the estimates for Amazon's sales in the UK market for the same period and they were quite close (~2.5% variance one way or the other).

Regards,
David

[filmo]

Kindle eink readers also use Linux OS and the hackers PDF reading program with reflow text for Kindle had some programers porting it to Kobo. They are continuing efforts for OS reader software for Linux OS e-readers including Kobos.

Look here.
Kobo Developer's Corner
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=247

[TechniSol]

Vug,

You remind me of the man peeing into the wind who becomes exasperated at getting wet shoes...

Why not simply employ Calibre to manage your enormous library, use it to select multiple titles and change the metadata of the group in one fell swoop to put them all on the correct shelf. It really is quite easy. Plus you can have the same title represented on multiple shelves so you can easily browse titles in manners not represented by your singular directory based file structure. That is a good part of why a database, properly implemented, is a more flexible search or browsing tool.

While we're at it, why don't you, Ken Maltby and a few others get together, hit the developer's forum and go check out the source for KindlePDFViewer or whatever they've renamed it to and see if the file selection methods there might meet your needs... If not, it might be a good place to find code to roll your own browser.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

My Cowon J3 (not a cheap MP3 player) does support directories. So there going your cheap (with directories) vs not cheap (without directories) theory.

Just to add to the directories debate: they would be trivial to implement on a Kobo if Kobo decided to. Unix has the API to traverse directory trees. You can create the data structure to include all of the ePub files in roughly 20 lines of code. Then their only concern would be implementing a browser in the UI. I don't know how their UI works so I don't know how hard it would be to implement, but it would be much easier than parsing and rendering ePub files.

With respect to the MP3 player comparison: it would be easy to do the directory thing with cheap MP3 players (at least the ones I've seen) since there is almost no UI code. Expensive MP3 players made it harder because implementing a sophisticated UI is harder.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by theonna

I thought that you have no control over the order in your collections, they are displayed sorted either by recent read, title or author, same as library? And if so, contents of a folder could also be sorted by time added or file name.

Shelves have an extra sort order that the main library list doesn't have. This is "Date Added". And uses the timestamp when the book was added to the shelf. I know at least one person here uses this to order books for series in a shelf. It would be a pain to do if you have a lot of series, but useful if you are setting one up to read.

[TechniSol]

You can also create your shelves sorted by series order... mine are. That is to say you can use Calibre to rename titles such that they end up on the shelves named as: Series Title #Index - Title like: The Dresden Files #04 - Summer Knight, for instance -with only a very minor bit of jumping through hoops required. Having done so once, the rest are a cakewalk. The best part is, once done in a third party app like Calibre, you never have to do it again as long as your reader supports it.

[theonna]

Originally Posted by TechniSol

While we're at it, why don't you, Ken Maltby and a few others get together, hit the developer's forum and go check out the source for KindlePDFViewer or whatever they've renamed it to and see if the file selection methods there might meet your needs... If not, it might be a good place to find code to roll your own browser.

So, what you actually saying, forget about asking Kobo to improve anything, rely on volunteer miracle workers, that agree with you and think they can port a better reader from some place, but it can not be done fully legally, since Kindle stuff is copyrighted... and you'd risk bricking your device, but then it is even better, you'd stop complaining and go away.

Originally Posted by theonna

So, what you actually saying, forget about asking Kobo to improve anything, rely on volunteer miracle workers, that agree with you and think they can port a better reader from some place, but it can not be done fully legally, since Kindle stuff is copyrighted... and you'd risk bricking your device, but then it is even better, you'd stop complaining and go away.

I like half of your answer, and don't get the other half.

The part I like is about relying on volunteer miracle workers. The ability to do this is a great thing! We should all be able to contribute to software with whatever skills we have, and open source makes this possible. Kobo's heavy reliance on open source extends this to their products. (For what it's worth: those miracle workers can do what they do because they understand sqlite, and open source project.)

As for the copyrighted/patented bit: I seriously doubt that Kobo can do much outside of nickel, and a few other proprietary applications/libraries. Databases themselves are not copyrightable. Since Kobo uses sqlite, they can't even claim rights to the data structures and file format it those were copyrightable. It is possible for people to do stuff of questionable legal standing if they are reverse engineering Kobo software, but most of the stuff I've seen is working at the level of open source software -- thus not of questionable standing.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by theonna

So, what you actually saying, forget about asking Kobo to improve anything, rely on volunteer miracle workers, that agree with you and think they can port a better reader from some place, but it can not be done fully legally, since Kindle stuff is copyrighted... and you'd risk bricking your device, but then it is even better, you'd stop complaining and go away.

As the thread title is "Can Kobo Mini be ROOTED to provide..." it does sound like the answer to the OPs question

And as to bricking an Kobo device, you really have to go out of your way to do that with the current devices. And most can be recovered with a little open heart surgery.

[TechniSol]

Theonna,

I really was being genuine, but after reading your post and the attitude behind it I could probably get behind the whole "you'd go away and stop complaining" thing with a minimum of persuasion.

Who knows, if you guys show them how they might see the value of it... You might even be able to slip the browser in such a way that it's selection could be passed to one of the existing readers if the KindlePDFReader isn't your cup of tea, but the latest version looked pretty good when I had it running on my Glo, with the exception of some minor functionality needing to be added in the landscape mode.

However, I don't think it'll change the whole dbase concept. They have good bit of code written for it, possibly some that could be, let's say, optimized... but they could rework the library by making it a browser that sorts on multi-level criteria like Genre:Author:Title rather than single level orders. I'd like that as with a few other tweaks it could do more, possibly faster than reading directory structures and still having to perform multi-level sorts on any structure other than the physical structure, unless you guys would be satisfied with only ever browsing the way you'd organized those directories. Me, I want MORE.

Originally Posted by davidfor

And as to bricking an Kobo device, you really have to go out of your way to do that with the current devices. And most can be recovered with a little open heart surgery.

This is an excellent point. The three Kobo devices that I've owned (Touch, Vox, Aura) have a partition with the firmware as it shipped from the factory. To my knowledge, it is impossible to modify this firmware without a conscious decision of the user as well as considerable technical knowledge. While I can't speak for the Vox, since it's now packed away, the factory reset is initiated by the bootstrap so it takes even deeper technical knowledge to make a factory reset impossible. And if your knowledge is that deep, hopefully you have enough sense to create a system image first and are capable of doing the open heart surgery bit.

It is hard to break a Kobo. (Though there are times when it has made me wonder if recovery is possible, my Touch and Aura have always come through.)