Gen3 When will Bookeen post a new firmware update?

[gerraldo]

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

Bookeen told that ages ago.

Bookeen blog's, 17 of February

And then some complains bookeen don't say anything. Well, if you don't bother to listen.

As they've done with folder support or a functioning delete button...

If you care to read the text again:
"Bookeen has signed an agreement with Adobe to license the Adobe Reader Mobile SDK for its products. The new software engine delivers support for reflowable PDF technology, Adobe’s content protection technology, as well as the EPUB file format..."

The Mobipocket technology allows for adjustable margins, line spacing, page numbers etc. and none of these is already used in CyBooks software (though it's available since ages on other platforms/devices).

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Ortep

I don't really care about folders. What I really want is the possibilly to sort or jump on meta data. That will give me virtual folders and those are of much more use than fixed ones.

One level virtual folders are not as useful as many levels fixed folders. Also the tools to add tags does not exists on all platforms that you want to handle your book collection on. Real folders are the basic thing that is really useful. One level virtual folders is a nice add-on but not essential.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Manichean

As far as I know, that opinion is based solely on speculation and hearsay concerning Mobipocket licencing practices. Who knows, maybe Bookeen renegotiated the licence contract, or Mobipocket updated it to allow multiple DRM schemes on a single device... (And no, I don't believe in Santa. Nor the easter bunny.)

HarryT asked Bookeen and the answer if I remember correctly was that there are going to be two firmware versions. You will not get both EPub and MobiPocket support at the same time.

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by tompe

HarryT asked Bookeen and the answer if I remember correctly was that there are going to be two firmware versions. You will not get both EPub and MobiPocket support at the same time.

and the firmware option to pick may not be simple if stores are going to 'restrict' what we can purchase.....

[Ortep]

Originally Posted by tompe

One level virtual folders are not as useful as many levels fixed folders. Also the tools to add tags does not exists on all platforms that you want to handle your book collection on. Real folders are the basic thing that is really useful. One level virtual folders is a nice add-on but not essential.

The tools are available for 99% of the people. If somebody wants to create ebooks that person can use Mobi-Creator or Calibre. It is very easy to include meta data. And in most of the books you buy or get for free the meta data is already in place. If the data is not correct there is a group of tools called MobiPerl that will do the job very nicely. They are available on Linux and Windows and on Windows you don't even need Perl. You can get the compiled version. All software mentioned her is free of charge.

And I have absolutely no problem with multi level virtual folders. First sort on Genre, then on Author and then on Title. Or first on Author then on genre and than on read. The information is already available in a mobi book. Why not use it?

Fixed level folders have on big disadvantage. The are fixed. You can use virtual folders as fixed if you like it that way. But you cannot use fixed folders in a virtual way.

If you for example have a fixed tree like Genre-> Author -> Serie -> Title That will not give you all the books from one author if that author has books that fall in different genres. Or if a serie is written bij several authors you will also run into trouble. When you use virtual folders based on meta data you can find any book from Author 'X' or any book in Genre 'Y' Or all books belonging to serie 'Z' writen by author 'Q'

At the moment I have my books in folders by Author and sometimes series. That works reasonable when I sort my books on filename. They are grouped by Author and then sorted on (serie) title. But it makes a joke of my Perry Rhodan serie. That one is written by several authors. So I have that one under 'Author' Perry Rhodan. But then I cannot find the real author in an easy way.


That is the reason why all large databases are not made in Excel The town you live in probably has some kind of big database of all people living there. Birthdate, Gender, marital status, drivers licence, address and probalby more. I can guarantee you it is not build as a big bunch of fixed folders for every person. It will be a big relational database in SAP or Oracle.
Because sometimes they want to know which people are over 65 and were they live. So they can plan medical facilities in the correct part of town. But the next time they wil want to send everybody information about the new type of tickets they use in the public transport system. Then they want to sort on address so they send them on five different days to five different parts of town. And the week after they will want to know how many girls between 10 and 13 there are so the can set up a vacination scheme for HPV.

Fixed is better than nothing, but is the answer to only one question. And that question is 'asked' at the moment you are building your tree.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Ortep

Fixed is better than nothing, but is the answer to only one question. And that question is 'asked' at the moment you are building your tree.

But nearly all questions you will ask will belong to this set and since it is a fixed tree it is optimized for the questions you want to pose.

I get the advantage of tags but to be able to simulate a fixed directory structure you have to write a tagging tool that can handle the kind of constraints that are implicit in the fixed tree. You have to have a level on your tags and you have to be able to say that for a certain sequence of levelled tags the next tag must belong to a specific set. The you can enforce the thing you get implicitly with fixed directories.

The existing tagging tools I have seen does not seem to be so good but I might just have missed some good tools.

[Ortep]

Originally Posted by tompe

But nearly all questions you will ask will belong to this set and since it is a fixed tree it is optimized for the questions you want to pose.

No it is not. If your tree is: Genre->Author->Title how are you going to find all books from Author 'Jones' who has written five fantasy books, half a dozen SciFi and three non fiction books on biology?

You can find them easily if your tree was Author->Genre->Title but then you will have problems finding all SciFi books by different authors

I get the advantage of tags but to be able to simulate a fixed directory structure you have to write a tagging tool that can handle the kind of constraints that are implicit in the fixed tree. You have to have a level on your tags and you have to be able to say that for a certain sequence of levelled tags the next tag must belong to a specific set.

No you don't need a level in tags, you'll get it for free. The only thing you need is different (agreed) tags like: Author, Genre, Title, Language. Those tag names are already in mobi books.

You will have an menu with those tag names. That menu will be identical to a folder list. Select for example Genre. Then you get a list of available genres: (Only the ones that are in your library) Then select for example SciFi and then you only can select from author, language, title and so on. It will narrow down. As soon as you selected SciFi you will not find any authors that only wrote romance

So if your preferred Folder structure is something like Language->Genre->Author->Title nobody is stopping you from moving through the menu in this order. It is like walking a directory tree. The big advantage is that also nobody is stopping you from walking it in this way: Author->Language->Genre->Title

Every cheap MP3 player works more or less like that. On my Zen I can select music on composer, artist, title, album and genre. So if I want R&B I will find all R&B songs from all artists that are on the player. Even if they are on different albums from different artists etc. I'll also find the one R&B number on the album from an artist who normally does only Celtic Love songs. If I have no R&B at all it will not be visible in my genre list it only shows what is available. If I invent a new genre called qwreksjfjhfkjfh that will be available as soon as that text is in a genre tag somewhere in an MP3 on the player. As soon as I delete it, that genre is not available anymore.

On my MP3 player I can even modify the menu's and leave out things I don't need. I have the 'Type' Video, but I don't use it for watching video, so that choice is made hidden by me. You can use that on an eBook reader to hide the language tag if you only read in one language. If you don't care about the publisher, why show the tag? Hide it.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Ortep

No it is not. If your tree is: Genre->Author->Title how are you going to find all books from Author 'Jones' who has written five fantasy books, half a dozen SciFi and three non fiction books on biology?

The master tree is on my computer so I use grep and find for example. On my reader I need as in the case of my bookshelf to find a book and then the speed of finding a book will be optimized if the easy to navigate to directories corresponds to how I think. Choosing in a tag list conatining all possible tags will be much slower than just going down a tree with very few choices on each level.

No you don't need a level in tags, you'll get it for free. The only thing you need is different (agreed) tags like: Author, Genre, Title, Language. Those tag names are already in mobi books.

I wanted to have the levels so that an author can have the same name as a genre for example. Or so that a subsubgenre can have the same name as a subgenre. Of course you can syntactically code the level in the tag name but that is ugly.

You will have an menu with those tag names. That menu will be identical to a folder list.

No it will not since the folder list only will contain the to level folders. The tag menu will contain all tags.

Also with tags it is hard to get into the tool facts like that a book cannot be a cosy and hardboiled at the same time for example. This you get for free in a folder structure. Also as I said it is hard to represent that a tag can only have a set of specific sub-tags (not all tags are possible as a sub tag). I would say that cosy should only be able to have on a cimre book so the tag system should detect that marking something else as a cose is wrong.

Every cheap MP3 player works more or less like that. On my Zen I can select music on composer, artist, title, album and genre.

But that is not flat tags.

[Ortep]

Originally Posted by tompe

But that is not flat tags.

The tags in a Mobi book are more or less the same as the tags in an MP3 file

Author->Artist
Title->Title
Genre->Genre

Etc->Etc

If you declare the MP3 tags 'not flat' the same is true for the Mobi tags

There is no 'order' or 'level' at all. The are simply text fields inside the file. And when you are choosing music you will get virtual levels because you select it at that moment. The order or level can change in an instant if you decide to look at them in another way.

It will be very easy to implement that in a CyBook. It is a proven concept an more than an hundred million people use it on a daily basis with MP3 players.

There is not much difference between searching for a book that was written by a certain writer and searching for a song from a special artist. Or looking for a group of Classic Rock songs and looking for Mystery books


Using 'grep' is almost impossible because you don't have a keyboard. And even if it was possible: Did you ever tried to explain grep to your mother in law? Even most people using Linux don't use it. They use all kind of GUI tools

No it will not since the folder list only will contain the to level folders. The tag menu will contain all tags.

No it won't. It will only show the relevant tags. So your first 'level' will only show you the following text:

Genre
Author
Title

As soon as you choose Genre you will see

SciFi
Romance
Non Fiction
Mystery

But ONLY so if those genres are available on your Cybook.

If you select SciFi you will see

Anderson
Asimov
Heinlein

But ONLY if you have books of those writers

You should play with an MP3 player and you will get te idea

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by GeoffC

and the firmware option to pick may not be simple if stores are going to 'restrict' what we can purchase.....

You don't need to pick just one. Have two SD cards, one with each firmware on it. Reflashing is sufficiently easy that I think that would work pretty well.

[gerraldo]

Originally Posted by Ortep

I don't really care about folders. What I really want is the possibilly to sort or jump on meta data. That will give me virtual folders and those are of much more use than fixed ones.
Today I want my books sorted on Author, tomorrow perhaps on Title, on Genre or on read/unread.

Originally Posted by Ortep

Every cheap MP3 player works more or less like that. On my Zen I can select music on composer, artist, title, album and genre. So if I want R&B I will find all R&B songs from all artists that are on the player.

Exactly what I was thinking (BTW: I too have a ZEN...).

The first thing I wanted to have on my CyBook was that A-Z bar where you can jump to the starting letters of titles. This and sorting by different criteria/tags would suit me fine (who needs folders anyway?!)

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Ortep

You should play with an MP3 player and you will get te idea

Well, if I on my Nokia N85 choose a genre I get all songs in that genre and cannot choose an artist. Also the artist list is to long for navigating on an eInk device so you if you have a player that works as you say you need a way to introduce some way to reduce the menu length for e.g. all authors.

With flat tags I meant something like del.icio.us use. If you call the author name a tag (I would call it a property) I would say named tag or something similar.

Of course if you are not restricted to flat tags you can build a tagging tool that can handle the things I think is usually missing and of course you can have an application that uses the tags or properties in a better way than my phone. But I think that most people will use only simple tagging tools and the first version of a selector on a reader handling tags will be very primitive and will work worse than a fixed folder structure would have worked.

[gerraldo]

Originally Posted by tompe

The master tree is on my computer so I use grep...

So you're a linux afficionado, ey...

Now that makes kinda sense...

[tompe]

Originally Posted by gerraldo

So you're a linux afficionado, ey...

Now that makes kinda sense...

Well Unix really but now use mostly Linux but is also sometimes using my Sunray at work which run Solaris. And yes I have a tendency to only see limitations in new interfaces or new way to do things because I compare them to how you do it in a real operating system like Unix or in a real text editor like Emacs and always finds the new way lacking in some respect (usually lacking programmability or simple things like incremental search in you editor or lacking the possibility to reconfigure the key bindings and so on...). Or missing grep and find

[ggendel]

Originally Posted by tompe

Well Unix really but now use mostly Linux but is also sometimes using my Sunray at work which run Solaris. And yes I have a tendency to only see limitations in new interfaces or new way to do things because I compare them to how you do it in a real operating system like Unix or in a real text editor like Emacs and always finds the new way lacking in some respect (usually lacking programmability or simple things like incremental search in you editor or lacking the possibility to reconfigure the key bindings and so on...). Or missing grep and find

Warning... Side topic:

You should try OpenSolaris on your SunRay. They're coming real close to the point where I'd be comfortable chucking my Windows, Linux and Mac OS/X machines for OpenSolaris. If they can just get a version of Skype that works, it's golden. ZFS, Dtrace, Crossbow, and other technologies have made my life a lot easier. Appliances using Zones make it a dream to move things from one box to another. Need to move a firewall router, mail or web server? Just clone the zone from the original machine to the new one. Very cool.