Kindle firmware update 5.14.2

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Freedomland

I use collections as I've said. I also use Calibre and amazon Cloud collections. case in point. Dune by Frank Herbert. He wrote the first 6 books. so in Calibre, I renamed them:
01-Dune
02-Dune Messiah
03-Children of Dune et all

then his son wrote a few books.. a prelude, Paul of Dune and a few others that go in-between these
00-Prelude
01.5- Paul of Dune
02.5-(some other title) etc

on the app and on the old PW it went correctly
00-
01-
01.5-
02-
02.5-
etc.

on the New PW.. it does it this way:
00-
01.5-
01-
02.5-
02-

That's the bug.

I wonder how they managed to do that. Any normal sort would do it right (unless your hyphen is actually a n-dash or something like that). I suppose you could workaround it by changing ‘01-’ to ‘01.0-’ or ‘01 -‘, etc.

[hleo12]

Originally Posted by Freedomland

That's on the old interface. The new interface doesn't show up when you install the update. It suddenly appears afterwards..and it's VERY different!! NONE of your suggestions are possible in the new interface.

That's how you do it on the new interface. I have it set like that right now.

[CathyA]

Originally Posted by Gripweed

I tried a dozen times, there are no three vertical lines in the upper left corner that I can see. Does anyone else see them? Has anyone else gotten their collections to appear in List view?

I've had it with these tiny cover photos. I'm 66 yrs. old and my optometrist says it's just a matter of time before my cataracts ripen and he can rip them out and put artificial lens in. In the meantime about half the book covers look like a spectrum of shades of grey from white to black. The only way I can pick a book is to click on the unknown cover so that the name of the book appears. Having to do this for the 500+ books waiting to be read is very time consuming. Surprisingly I haven't entirely lost the ability to read text yet and so my reading can go on even though it is a bit fuzzy.
It's obvious that the people at Amazon who are making the Kindle UI decisions are twenty year olds with perfect 20/20 vision.

Yes, it works fine for me. Here are the steps I used, with pictures, to get things as much like the Collections view in the previous version as I can.

Step 1: use settings to turn on collections in list view.
- Swipe down from the top
- Select All Settings
- Navigate to Device Options / Advanced Options / Home & Library / Collections
- Choose either "Show favorites in Library" or "Show all in Library"
- Touch the X to close the setting page

Step 2: set your library to List Mode
- Touch the 3 lines just below the 3 dots in the upper right corner, see screenshot #1 for the location
- Choose your favorite sort order in the Sort by section
- Choose List under View options, see screenshot #2

Step 3: set your filter to Collections
- touch the three bars with the dots on them just below the search box, see screenshot #1 for the location
- choose Collections under Type, see screenshot #3

Open a collection. You should see a list view. See screenshot #4. Note that the sort order within collections is separate from the sort order of the main library screen, so you can adjust it if you wish.

[Gripweed]

Originally Posted by hleo12

That's how you do it on the new interface. I have it set like that right now.

Attachment 192898

Where are the three vertical lines on the upper left corner?
You said:
Set your library view to List first. Then on the upper left corner, the three vertical lines, you can select Collections filter there so your library will be in list view but only displays collections.

In answer to tomsem, I am already using 5.14.2 and before trying the hleo12's method (which ended when I couldn't find 3 vertical lines) I was in Collections view. My Settings, Device Options, Advanced Options, Home & Library, Collections was set to Show Only in Collections view. I do not have Favorites setup. Show All doesn't seem to change anything from what I had but it seems to me that the Show Only in Collections setting is the one I want.

[shalym]

Originally Posted by Gripweed

I tried a dozen times, there are no three vertical lines in the upper left corner that I can see. Does anyone else see them? Has anyone else gotten their collections to appear in List view?

I've had it with these tiny cover photos. I'm 66 yrs. old and my optometrist says it's just a matter of time before my cataracts ripen and he can rip them out and put artificial lens in. In the meantime about half the book covers look like a spectrum of shades of grey from white to black. The only way I can pick a book is to click on the unknown cover so that the name of the book appears. Having to do this for the 500+ books waiting to be read is very time consuming. Surprisingly I haven't entirely lost the ability to read text yet and so my reading can go on even though it is a bit fuzzy.
It's obvious that the people at Amazon who are making the Kindle UI decisions are twenty year olds with perfect 20/20 vision.

I'm attaching pictures of what I see in the new interface. I agree with you that I think it's an awful change, but there is definitely a way to see the titles of the books in list view.

In the first one, named HomeScreen, you can see an arrow pointing to the Library. Once you're in the library, if you look at the top right of the screen, you'll see three lines stacked on top of each other. In the image named 3Lines you'll see an arrow pointing to them. When you touch those 3 lines, a menu pops up from the bottom with different options. At the bottom of those options is "View options" where you can change from grid view to list view.

Hope this helps.

Shari

[Gripweed]

Thank you CathyA !!

That brought all the pieces together (minus imaginary vertical lines). This I can definitely live with.

Your message should be made into a Sticky here for all that want a version of List in their Collections.

[CathyA]

Originally Posted by Gripweed

Thank you CathyA !!

That brought all the pieces together (minus imaginary vertical lines). This I can definitely live with.

Your message should be made into a Sticky here for all that want a version of List in their Collections.

You're welcome, glad to help.

[Freedomland]

Originally Posted by hleo12

That's how you do it on the new interface. I have it set like that right now.

Attachment 192898

But like that, you won't see any non collected books .
The best way would show all. Or a list view option in Collections.

[Gripweed]

Now that I have List view with Collections, I think I found a bug. If you look at the percentage read at the bottom of what you are reading and then go back to the list of books in that book's Collection. The percentage shown in the Collection display for the book you are reading is always 1% less than what it shows in the book. In other words, the book says 20% and the Collection says 19%. That didn't happening in my last version, 5.14.1.1. I said it was a bug, I didn't say it was a big bug.

It does mess me up since I read 4 books in a circuitous order, 10% at a time for each book. I know, weird, but it works for me to keep my interest up. I've never been one to read a book start to finish. I guess I'll just have to learn to ignore the Collection display.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Gripweed

Now that I have List view with Collections, I think I found a bug. If you look at the percentage read at the bottom of what you are reading and then go back to the list of books in that book's Collection. The percentage shown in the Collection display for the book you are reading is always 1% less than what it shows in the book. In other words, the book says 20% and the Collection says 19%. That didn't happening in my last version, 5.14.1.1. I said it was a bug, I didn't say it was a big bug.

It does mess me up since I read 4 books in a circuitous order, 10% at a time for each book. I know, weird, but it works for me to keep my interest up. I've never been one to read a book start to finish. I guess I'll just have to learn to ignore the Collection display.

On Kindle, it is computed from ‘locations’, which is the arbitrary, algorithmic method they came up with to sync reading position between the different devices supported on Kindle platform since the very first Kindle. It tries to reflect the ‘amount of reading’ you have done, and has nothing to do with how the pages are laid out in a given book, which can vary depending on the device.

The percentage shown in the book is always the current location divided by total locations times 100, rounded to the nearest whole percentage number. If the fractional value is 41.51%, it will say 42% in the book.

Meanwhile, back in Library view, it takes a dimmer view of your so called progress. It is not going to round up. You ain’t there yet, any more than you are 38 a week short of your 38th birthday. It just truncates. That 42% becomes 41%.

The two numbers agree whenever the fractional percentage is less than .5. If you are at 41.49% then both contexts will show 41%. But secretly, you are nearly half the way to the next whole percentage.

I see no difference when viewed inside a collection vs not in a collection. There should not be any.

I don’t have any way to check, but I don’t think this has changed with the update. But when there’s a big design change, it is normal to ‘notice more’.

Note that the Kindle apps don’t use the same computation for percentage, using ‘locations’. In fact, it’s not always possible to see what the current location is, or navigate to a specific location number (if the book has ‘real page numbers’). I think percentage is probably based on which (display) page you are on out of the total number of (display) pages, but have not checked this.

[hleo12]

Originally Posted by Gripweed

Thank you CathyA !!

That brought all the pieces together (minus imaginary vertical lines). This I can definitely live with.

Your message should be made into a Sticky here for all that want a version of List in their Collections.

Horizontal. I misspoke. But there are still 3 of them and it's hard to miss.

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by tomsem

On Kindle, it is computed from ‘locations’, which is the arbitrary, algorithmic method they came up with to sync reading position between the different devices supported on Kindle platform since the very first Kindle. It tries to reflect the ‘amount of reading’ you have done

That makes it sound much smarter than it is. The design is clearly aimed at sheer implementation simplicity over everything else. A single location value is 128 bytes long, with a new location starting at every offset through the book's text divisible by 128 bytes (not Unicode codepoints, not characters-not-counting-spaces, bytes): in MOBI and AZW this counts the (invisible) markup, in KFX it seemingly does not (so you can get different location counts and total lengths by switching from a AZW to a KFX version of the same book. As an aside, I wonder if this suggests that in KFX the markup is out-of-band somehow and points into the text from "outside", and both location implementations are just counting bytes in a byte stream).

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by NullNix

That makes it sound much smarter than it is. The design is clearly aimed at sheer implementation simplicity over everything else. A single location value is 128 bytes long, with a new location starting at every offset through the book's text divisible by 128 bytes (not Unicode codepoints, not characters-not-counting-spaces, bytes): in MOBI and AZW this counts the (invisible) markup, in KFX it seemingly does not (so you can get different location counts and total lengths by switching from a AZW to a KFX version of the same book. As an aside, I wonder if this suggests that in KFX the markup is out-of-band somehow and points into the text from "outside", and both location implementations are just counting bytes in a byte stream).

That is not quite true. There are two ways that content is referenced in Kindle formats, "locations" and "positions".

Position numbers each refer to a single exact point within the e-book content. Each Kindle format has its own way of handling positions. For MOBI and KF8 formats position numbers count bytes of raw HTML content. For KFX position numbers count Unicode characters of visible text. For a single book the same position number will refer to different content depending of the format in which it was delivered.

Locations refer to an approximate place within the e-book content, independent of the actual Kindle format in which the book was delivered. Each location occupies 150 bytes of the raw html of the book in MOBI format. So each location occupies 150 positions in MOBI. That was the original simple implementation of locations.

The newer Kindle formats use mapping tables that translate between location and position numbers so that each location points to the same place within the book as it does in MOBI format. The position number corresponding to each location will be different for each Kindle format.

[Gripweed]

Originally Posted by tomsem

I don’t have any way to check, but I don’t think this has changed with the update. But when there’s a big design change, it is normal to ‘notice more’.

It has changed with the update, I assure you of that. I have been using my 10% method of reading for years. This goes back over at least 3 physical Kindle devices and an unknown total of firmware versions. If usage is measured in two different ways on the same device then that is a bug.

[Gripweed]

Originally Posted by hleo12

Horizontal. I misspoke. But there are still 3 of them and it's hard to miss.

I really don't want to get into semantics but there are no 3 horizontal lines in the upper left corner. The only thing in the upper left corner is the clock. Do you mean the symbol with three horizontal lines that has a circle on each of the lines that appears on the left side just below the Search Kindle rounded box? Normally I would associate that symbol with a sound equalizer (although more often you see it vertically) but Amazon has chosen to use it as a filter symbol. The symbol that I have seen more often for a filter is a depiction of a funnel.