New Reader Owner -- Format Question

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I disagree. The current file system works fine for a couple of hundred books (I have about 160 at the moment on my Reader). It would be unworkable for a couple of thousand, but for a couple of hundred it works OK. If you have, say, 200 books, you'll have to go through, on average, 10 index pages to get to where you want to be. That only takes a few seconds. I can live with that .

Well... I'll repeat my plea for hierarchical selection using the number keys. With 10 buttons, you should be able to get to any of 1000 books no more than three button presses by selecting your way in 1/10th of the books at each level. Thus, you'd push the button for "Kill... to Now...," then the button for "Kill One... to Kraft..." then the button for "Kill One for the Gipper" (all titles completely bogus). Each button offers you a 1/10th sub-range of the books.

It oughta be trivial to program this up for selection-by-title and selection-by-author. And it would make dealing with large libraries convenient!

Is anyone listening? Firmware Hackers? Sony???


Beuhler?

[JSWolf]

Actually, what needs to be fixed more then the file structure is the italics. They are way off. The problem is that Sony takes the non-italic font and "adjusts" it to be italic. And then spacing at the end it the italic is way off. So if you have this is a test. on the Reader it can end up looking like This is a test .

That is NOT good. The way to fix it is it add a true italic font of the ones already in the reader.

This is why I am looking forward to Book Designer and html2lrf being able to properly use other fonts so I can at least use a true Italic font and get the spacing correct. But Sony really needs to fix this.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by HarryT

So what? You just re-load them from your hard disk, or wherever you loaded them from in the first place!



I disagree. The current file system works fine for a couple of hundred books (I have about 160 at the moment on my Reader). It would be unworkable for a couple of thousand, but for a couple of hundred it works OK. If you have, say, 200 books, you'll have to go through, on average, 10 index pages to get to where you want to be. That only takes a few seconds. I can live with that .

I have about 230. That's about the limit for me. I, too, can easily live with that amount, because at any given time I'm only reading about 5 books. When I finish one, I cue up another and see if I want to read that one. I have a 2gig sans disk card.

I also have about 100 other files (books) I downloaded from this site, but they're on the computer.

Don

[RWood]

Originally Posted by Xenophon

Well... I'll repeat my plea for hierarchical selection using the number keys. With 10 buttons, you should be able to get to any of 1000 books no more than three button presses by selecting your way in 1/10th of the books at each level. Thus, you'd push the button for "Kill... to Now...," then the button for "Kill One... to Kraft..." then the button for "Kill One for the Gipper" (all titles completely bogus). Each button offers you a 1/10th sub-range of the books.

It oughta be trivial to program this up for selection-by-title and selection-by-author. And it would make dealing with large libraries convenient!

Is anyone listening? Firmware Hackers? Sony???

Beuhler?

While such a system as you describe may be good for you, but it would be almost impossible to use for the average user that Sony wants to sell the Reader to.

KISS -- Keep It Simple Stupid is the mantra for file organization when dealing with the public. Press forward or back until you find the title of the book you want in the alphabetical list. Simple enough for my Mother-in-law to use.

If you want a subdirectory organized file system get a bunch of small SD or MS cards and put SciFi on one, classics on another, magna on a third, etc. and carry them with you so that you can slip the right one in when you need it.

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by RWood

While such a system as you describe may be good for you, but it would be almost impossible to use for the average user that Sony wants to sell the Reader to.

That's how every address book in the world (or at least the US) works. You know... Tabs for the first letter of peoples names. With some having multiple letters. A, B, ... M-N-O, ... X-Y-Z. Usually about 20 tabs. All I'm suggesting is that you get a nice little alphabetic listing, pre-split by tenths.

If it doesn't work for everyone, well, it would be an easy option to offer. Could even be configurable.

KISS is all very well and good. But anyone who is likely to put hundreds of books on their reader (or more!) is likely to be able to handle an interface like the one I described.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Xenophon

That's how every address book in the world (or at least the US) works. You know... Tabs for the first letter of peoples names. With some having multiple letters. A, B, ... M-N-O, ... X-Y-Z. Usually about 20 tabs. All I'm suggesting is that you get a nice little alphabetic listing, pre-split by tenths.

If it doesn't work for everyone, well, it would be an easy option to offer. Could even be configurable.

KISS is all very well and good. But anyone who is likely to put hundreds of books on their reader (or more!) is likely to be able to handle an interface like the one I described.

That's called COLLECTIONS! As long as your books are only residing on the internal memory that is. You can setup collections to help sort your books how ou want. It you want to to it by letter groups like a phone index then go for it.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by RWood

KISS -- Keep It Simple Stupid is the mantra for file organization when dealing with the public. Press forward or back until you find the title of the book you want in the alphabetical list. Simple enough for my Mother-in-law to use.

I agree with you entirely. It's worth bearing in mind that the Reader's lack of a hierarchical file system view is almost without a doubt due to Sony's fear that it would be too complex for Wood's Mother-in-Law to use, not due to their technical inability to implement it. We may regard such things as trivial, but they are "scary" for non computer geeks. I gave my parents an old PC a few years ago, for example, and everything they've used it for is in "My Documents", despite my explaining the benefits of "folders". Just one long list of files is the way they like it!

[dhbailey]

I agree with Harry -- it's often easy for those of us who are geeks to realize how scary and unintuitive the computer world really is for others. Even people who are capable of very complex things in other aspects of their lives have a hard time getting their heads around the way a computer-user has to think to get the most out of the computer.

Heck, just think of the members of this forum -- there are several who say they don't want to be bothered with collections! The heirarchical structure is possible now, for books loaded into the Reader's internal memory and people who are already self-proclaimed geeks by being members of this forum don't want to mess with it. If we can't all agree on its usefulness, I can well understand how the general public would react! All it would take is one person being the first in his group of friends to buy the reader and then not be able to find any books he somehow was able to load onto the reader, and he'd pooh-pooh the device to all his friends, and they'd never go near a Sony Reader again.

I'd love to see Sony implement the Collections idea for memory cards, though. I would think that all it would take in an upgrade would be the inclusion of a Collections database on the card which the reader would read, rather than having to go through all the files on the card and indexing them each time the card is inserted.

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I gave my parents an old PC a few years ago, for example, and everything they've used it for is in "My Documents", despite my explaining the benefits of "folders".

My wife (as many of you know already) is in the end stages of writing her dissertation, she's been using a PC all along, and has about 10 years' worth of files on it. Until I finally talked her into letting me explain how to make folders, she had it all in "My Documents" just like Harry's parents.

I'd explain to her that it really was ridiculously easy to make and handle folders, but she'd heard that too many times, and wouldn't listen. Of course, when she finally caved, she had to agree that this time it really was as easy as I said.

Right this moment, she has 22 folders ... and 154 files in "My Documents" -- I guess she's still organizing them

[kacir]

Originally Posted by dhbailey

The heirarchical structure is possible now, for books loaded into the Reader's internal memory and people who are already self-proclaimed geeks by being members of this forum don't want to mess with it.

I am one of those users.
I consider myself to be a geek.
I can't be bothered with collections.
I would, however, welcome any kind of hierarchical structure for files and (folders/directories/collections/groups/whatever-you-want-to-call-them) IF it would not force me to use the CONNECT software.

Originally Posted by dhbailey

I'd love to see Sony implement the Collections idea for memory cards, though.

THAT would be something.
We could reverse-engineer xml file the READER uses to create collections very easily and then we could use Collections without need to use "The Worst Software For Managing Content I Have Seen In A Loooooong Time" (Connect ;-) )
We could even use it on ANY operating system that allows us to mount an USB card reader. Like, for example, Windows 2003, or Windows 2000, or Windows 98, or Ubuntu or FreeBSD or [insert the name of your favourite geeky OS here]

What I would suggest to SONY is:
1. Make interface for READER for moving / copying / deleting files from card to memory and from memory to card
2. Make interface for READER that would allow us to manage collections (using joystick, enter, and 10 numbered buttons)
3. Hide those functions somewhere deep in the menus (behind an "Geeks ONLY!!!" "or Authorized Technicians Only" option) so you do not confuse / scare / intimidate our mothers in law, grandmothers or Pointy Haired Boses

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

That's called COLLECTIONS! As long as your books are only residing on the internal memory that is. You can setup collections to help sort your books how ou want. It you want to to it by letter groups like a phone index then go for it.

But I can't set up collections. Internal memory or not. After all, I have no computer on which Sony's &^%$^&%$^ Reader software will run. And the third-party interfaces don't support collections yet. And even if they did, that would only give one level of hierarchy. For one sort (author or book). And it would have to be maintained manually. I'm looking for three or four levels for each of title and author sort.

While I'm at it... please note that I'm not suggesting that this be the only way for things to work. Rather, I'm suggesting that Sony provide it as an option for those of us who want to have large numbers of books on the reader. Perhaps a configuration choice that lets you choose the biggest acceptable number of pages in a list of (book or authors), so that when the list is larger than N pages it switches to hierarchical display. Then, have a setting for "never use hierarchical display" and make that the default. Voila! Folks who want a simple interface get what they have today. Folks with a zillion books get something that works for them.

I just now thought of the perfect analogy for the system I'm after: A library card-catalog. Remember those? A wall of drawers labeled to show what range of entries are in each drawer. Anyone who reads enough to want to put several hundred books (or more) on their reader is highly likely to be familiar with that concept.

The key thought here is that I don't want to take away any of the current simplicity! Instead, I want a solution that adequately serves those with nearly-full 2GB cards as well as those who keep only a few books on the Reader.