Are Kobo devices and software still extremely buggy?

[PeterT]

The Aura, Aura HD, Glo, Touch, WiFi and Kobo original all run Linux as the underlying o/s, and have no linkage to the Vox and Arc tablets that are Android based.

[maurerc]

I bought an Aura HD then, in hopes that it would work better an Aura. They crash frequently, tell me that I have finished the book when I have not, open to the wrong page. Sometimes footnotes work but usually trying to click on the link merely turns the page. No matter how carefully I do it, the Aura often misinterprets my two-finger stroke to change the lighting, and changes the font size instead. Sometimes the font panel changes the characteristics and sometimes it doesn't: sometimes this may be the fault of the book but often the Aura behaves erratically with the same book, so it is clear there are problems with the software. Indeed, there are many, many problems with the software.

[cybmole]

for an alternative view:
I have had the Aura HD for 6 months

It has never crashed, & I am not aware of it ever opening to the wrong page.

I don't care for footnotes so no comment on that.

2 fingered gestures are a total pain to master but the simple solution is DONT USE THEM! there are sensible alternative ways to alter font & brightness & how often do you need to do that anyway.

Highlighting a phrase can be tricky but was even worse on ny SOny devices - I needed a stylus with those to have any chance of accuracy!

I can read in bed with the built in light & I have no issues with that, either.

I don't show at Kobo store so all my experience is with sideloaded books.

So I don't use wifi - except once to get an upgrade. My battery life is excellent.

I should add that setting up the Aura up when it arrived was a nightmare - 24+ hours of panic, confusion, much posting here for help... compared with about 2 minutes to get a sony unwrapped & working - but that was a one - off experience, which I try to forget now!


There are only 2 areas for me in which my previous Sony readers were better:
1) Kobo will not zoom epub images so maps etc in books are useless.
2) the infamous "long paragraph" bug - which is allegedly fixed now in 3.5 - if that ever rolls out as far as the UK


My last Sony device- the T3 - managed to corrupt it's highlights/annotations database within the first 2 weeks & had to be geekily fixed via an ( undocumented) file deletion trick using a PC USB connection. Its bad hyphenation ( not present in previous models) was driving me nuts until I learnt how to hack books & disable it via CSS. Then its screen failed shortly afterward, leading to an 8 week fight for a refund. After that I vowed to never buy Sony again.

[Anak]

If you mean that the firmware still contains numerous bugs, then yes if you take a look at the bug list.

I didn't have much cashes of my Glo. I am mainly using the device to read books. I do not use the extra features very often.
At the moment I am using firmware release 3.5.0 (1ad1188b51, 09-07-14) which is imho more buggy than previous 3.x.x firmware releases as I have had three to four crashes of the device and two times that I had to use the reset button to restart the device as it would not wake up from the sleep mode the normal way by holding the power button.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by cybmole

another Kobo software thing that puzzles me is why the kobo tablet android UI is so different from the KObo e-reader UI ( I assume that the Aura etc run a version of android also?) )

e.g. with a book open on tablet, a simple swipe down beings up the TOC overlay, that is quick & intuitive;
on the Aura HD I have to press carefully in 3 consecutive locations, then expand it - which is much slower and more error prone. is that because the e-ink screens cannot overlay windows ?

The Kobo Arc family of tablets run Android, the Kobo eInk ereaders run Linux. If you look in the Developer's Corner, you will find some information on running Android on the Kobo eInk readers though I personally found it of very limited use running on a Glo.

Regards,
David

[DentalCommander]

My Kobo Aura e-ink screen broke in the first month while in my pocket (no trauma), and the company will not help. Although the software was okay, the hardware and policies are not.

[the.Mtn.Man]

Honestly, Kobo devices are no more buggy than any other e-readers on the market. While they have their quirks, I've not had any significant problems with either the Touch, which I used for several years, and now the Aura.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by DentalCommander

My Kobo Aura e-ink screen broke in the first month while in my pocket (no trauma), and the company will not help. Although the software was okay, the hardware and policies are not.

Please note that eInk screens as used in most ereaders use very thin glass and are susceptible to cracking from twisting such as might occur when you have it in your pant's pocket and bend over to pick something up or pressure from bumping into a corner -- torque and pressure are not friends of an eInk screen. In the case of the Aura, the upper layer for the capacitive touch screen may not show any damage.

A protective outer case would help mostly by making harder to stuff the ereader into a pocket.

I also note that you posted that you "happened to be in Canada when this happened" and Chapters stated that Kobo did not fix screen anymore. Please note that Kobo has not been part of Chapers/Indigo since Chapters interest in Kobo was sold to Rakuten 3 years ago. IMNSHO, a random Chapters employee is not an authoritative source of information.

Perhaps I am reading more into what you posted that you meant, but that post seems to indicate that you did not purchase the Aura from Chapters or even in Canada. Perhaps you should have checked with whomever you purchased the Aura from as to what type of warranty service you might expect from them. Or even a polite email to Kobo customer service to find out what they could do about your situation. There have been several occasions where they have agreed that the screen damage occurred "under normal consumer use" and was covered under their limited warranty.

You can check the terms of the warranty for the countries where Kobo ereaders are sold from Kobo's website under their support documents. The limited warranty also spells out the procedure for obtaining a RMA, etc.

The terms do vary from country to country and even inside a country -- compare the warranty inside Quebec to that applying elsewhere in Canada as an example.

Good luck,
David

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Anak

If you mean that the firmware still contains numerous bugs, then yes if you take a look at the bug list.

I didn't have much cashes of my Glo. I am mainly using the device to read books. I do not use the extra features very often.
At the moment I am using firmware release 3.5.0 (1ad1188b51, 09-07-14) which is imho more buggy than previous 3.x.x firmware releases as I have had three to four crashes of the device and two times that I had to use the reset button to restart the device as it would not wake up from the sleep mode the normal way by holding the power button.

Interesting. In my family we have 3 Kobo ereaders (Aura HD, Aura and Glo) running firmware 3.5.0. Two were sideloaded, the other updated automatically a couple of weeks back. I've had no incidences of having to use the reset button to wake up from sleep and the only crash since the 3.5.0 update was on my Aura HD but then that is the only one of the three running patched firmware, a modified boot sequence (AdvBoot), an alternative reader, etc. Factory resets are us.

The only bugs I've run into in 3.5.0 are documented in the 3.5.0 bug thread and of the four bugs I noticed, three are of long standing and the new bug where the last word on the first line of an indented line/paragraph is not hyphenated is a issue in the updated RMSDK. Since the RMSDK in 3.5.0 fixed the long paragraph bug, I'm quite happy to trade that fix for the hyphenation issue which is not nearly as annoying to me.

Regards,
David

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by cybmole

There are only 2 areas for me in which my previous Sony readers were better:
1) Kobo will not zoom epub images so maps etc in books are useless.
2) the infamous "long paragraph" bug - which is allegedly fixed now in 3.5 - if that ever rolls out as far as the UK

With regards to 1, I use a SVG wrapper for full screen images to keep them full screen (or as close to that as a Kobo ereader gets) for any screen resolution. I've often ended up googling for a higher resolution image of a map since quite a few of the maps are fuzzy even on a 600x800 screen. Perhaps the 8400x4800 (23MB) map of the world of the Belgariad from the Cartographer's Guild is overkill but map images that are 300x380 are underkill.

And as near as I can tell -- Tolstoy's The Cossacks was my test book -- the long paragraph bug is not present in the 3.5.0's version of RMSDK.

Regards,
David

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by DNSB

With regards to 1, I use a SVG wrapper for full screen images to keep them full screen (or as close to that as a Kobo ereader gets) for any screen resolution.
David

ok - but that would mean hacking the original book code which is not always legal ( think ade-epub library loans)

I suppose I ought to learn how to do it really though

so lets see. what do I have to change in code like this, & can I automate it with regex ?
typical epub code for an map image witin a story:

<p class="toc"><img alt="Description: cyprus" class="calibre5" src="../Images/image002.jpg" /></p>

I got the long para bug several time within Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire. apart from that it has not really troubled me. I't's probably in all the Anne Rice vampire series but just one book was more than enough for me , I doubt I could crawl through another

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by cybmole

ok - but that would mean hacking the original book code which is not always legal ( think ade-epub library loans)

I suppose I ought to learn how to do it really though

so lets see. what do I have to change in code like this, & can I automate it with regex ?
typical epub code for an map image witin a story:

<p class="toc"><img alt="Description: cyprus" class="calibre5" src="../Images/image002.jpg" /></p>

I got the long para bug several time within Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire. apart from that it has not really troubled me. I't's probably in all the Anne Rice vampire series but just one book was more than enough for me , I doubt I could crawl through another

Here's what I use to wrap images when I want them to display as large as possible without aspect ratio changes.

(in the epub section file)

<style type="text/css">
@page {padding: 0pt; margin:0pt}
            body { text-align: center; padding:0pt; margin: 0pt; }
</style>
</head>

<body class="nomargin">
  <div class="svgwrapper">
    <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" height="100%" preserveAspectRatio="xMidYMid meet" version="1.1" viewBox="0 0 1521 2338" width="100%" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
      <image height="2338" width="1521" xlink:href="../Images/cover.jpg"></image>
    </svg>
  </div>

(in the stylesheet)

.nomargin  {
    display : block;
    text-align : center;
    margin : 0 0 0 0;
    padding : 0 0 0 0;
    }

.svgwrapper {
   display: block;
   margin-bottom: 0;
   margin-left: 0;
   margin-right: 0;
   margin-top: 0;
   padding-bottom: 0;
   padding-left: 0;
   padding-right: 0;
   padding-top: 0;
   text-align: center;
   }

Some of this is overkill since I'm setting the margins and padding to 0 multiple times but it works for me across multiple devices. Since there are relatively few full page images in most ebooks, I just copy and paste the code above, copy and paste the name of the image file, set the size (though strictly more setting the aspect ratio) and go from there. Oddly many ebooks use the svg wrapper for the cover image but set PreserveAspectRatio to "none" which does fill the screen but also distorts the image.

You might want to take a look at Liz Castro's Pigs, Gourds and Wikis site. While she is iPad oriented, quite a bit of her content applies to all ereaders.

Regards,
David

[cybmole]

ok - so where the source has a single xhtml page that goes:
<body.....
some text paragraph(s)
a <img ....picture...
some more text...
</body...

you would break that into 3 files ?

that would not be easy to automate i fear, or to do manually if a book has many images ?
I can see that it would be less traumatic if the images already have a file each, as some map images at start of books do.

here is an example from Game of thrones - the book starts with 4 x maps,that have already been placed into 4 separate files. So this should be an easier case - one that may even succumb to regex ?

If I pull out that.png image from the epub & check it's properties, it is 1400 x 2257. so it contains a lot of details which will be lost on an e-reader screen. So what's really needed here is the ability to zoom into parts of the image which I think is what the svg wrapper is intended to enable ?
maybe I should recode this & the next 3 , based on your guidance & see how it appears on the Aura HD when transferred ?
I should probably also move this to its own thread & not hijack the "buggy sofware" debate - though that seems to have fizzled out.

</head>

<body class="calibre">
  <div class="centered-image"><img alt="Map of The North" class="calibre9" src="../Images/map001.png" /></div>

  <div class="pgbrk" id="calibre_pb_0"></div>
</body>

[Anak]

I use variants of the settings below to display images without or with aspect ratio changes.

/* default general settings */ 
@page {margin:0;}
body {margn:0;padding:0;}
p,div{margin:0;padding:0;}

/* images */
/* keep aspect ratio */
.vertical-img {max-height:100%;height:100%;width:auto;}
.horizontal-img {max-width:100%;width:100%;height:auto;}

Note: there is no need to add width:auto or height:auto. I've added this to stress that the images are displayed with their original aspect ratios.

/* full screen distorted aspect ratio */
.fullscreen-img {max-height:100%;height:100%;width:100%;max-width:100%;}

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by cybmole

ok - so where the source has a single xhtml page that goes:
<body.....
some text paragraph(s)
a <img ....picture...
some more text...
</body...

you would break that into 3 files ?

that would not be easy to automate i fear, or to do manually if a book has many images ?
I can see that it would be less traumatic if the images already have a file each, as some map images at start of books do.

here is an example from Game of thrones - the book starts with 4 x maps,that have already been placed into 4 separate files. So this should be an easier case - one that may even succumb to regex ?

If I pull out that.png image from the epub & check it's properties, it is 1400 x 2257. so it contains a lot of details which will be lost on an e-reader screen. So what's really needed here is the ability to zoom into parts of the image which I think is what the svg wrapper is intended to enable ?
maybe I should recode this & the next 3 , based on your guidance & see how it appears on the Aura HD when transferred ?
I should probably also move this to its own thread & not hijack the "buggy sofware" debate - though that seems to have fizzled out.

</head>

<body class="calibre">
  <div class="centered-image"><img alt="Map of The North" class="calibre9" src="../Images/map001.png" /></div>

  <div class="pgbrk" id="calibre_pb_0"></div>
</body>

We should probably move this to a new thread. However if you look in the EBook Formats forum under the Epub section, you'll find a lot of this infomation is already there. One example is Svg wrapper and image resizing thread. https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=234077.

And yes, I do split the files which is a one click operation using Sigil. A bit of an annoyance but the other choice is to do the same coding inline which is a bit messier and led to some issues on some devices. Heck, the flipping iPad has enough issues with disregarding legitimate CSS as you will find on the Pigs, Gourds and Wikis blog or in the epub forum here.

Not sure if this thread fizzled or if we simply did an effective job of hijacking it.

Regards,
David