Should I Upgrade my Opus?

[mjmcleod]

Originally Posted by HarryT

It works fine with all the ePub books that I've created, because they do not "hard code" justification in the book. If justification is specified in the book, then the menu item won't do anything.

This is something I find really frustrating about the ePub implementations I've seen so far -- they all take a "publisher knows best" approach to layout, which means that when the publisher sets a crappy font or layout options which work really badly with large text, short of stripping the DRM and going in and editing the book you're stuck.

I'm fine with having display default to whatever the publisher wanted, but one of the key advantages of ebooks over paper is the ability to twiddle these things to suit the reader.

Am assuming this is because everyone just uses Adobe's code? FBReader and the Calibre viewer are the only things I've seen so far that even approach what I need, and it's tempting me to pick up a Hanlin variant so I can use OI just for FBReader. Or to load up 1.5 on my Opus and convert everything to Mobipocket.

[EowynCarter]

Originally Posted by mjmcleod

This is something I find really frustrating about the ePub implementations I've seen so far -- they all take a "publisher knows best" approach to layout, which means that when the publisher sets a crappy font or layout options which work really badly with large text, short of stripping the DRM and going in and editing the book you're stuck.

I'm fine with having display default to whatever the publisher wanted, but one of the key advantages of ebooks over paper is the ability to twiddle these things to suit the reader.

Am assuming this is because everyone just uses Adobe's code? FBReader and the Calibre viewer are the only things I've seen so far that even approach what I need, and it's tempting me to pick up a Hanlin variant so I can use OI just for FBReader. Or to load up 1.5 on my Opus and convert everything to Mobipocket.

Yeah, most or time, i "have" to edit the book, mainly to fix magins. But for the rest, i like having different styles.

[Nina182B]

Just wanted to share my experience after I finished reading one book (txt file) on the Opus. I went from v1.9 to v2.0:

Positive:
+ There were no crashes or freezing while reading. In v1.9, my Opus crashed a lot, so this is great!
+ Page turns in the library view were faster
+ Txt files shows the page numbers (like how epubs show the page numbers)
+ Boot up time decreased by 1 second (not a big deal but still a positive)

Negative:
- Halfway through the txt book, the page turns got really really slow (3 seconds). This lasted till the end of the book. When I opened another txt file that I haven't read before and was in the beginning, the page turns were fast. I'm assuming it's going to take 3 seconds halfway through.
- Some of my html files look really bad on v2.0 where they looked great (read able) in v1.9. For example, some html files only showed 10-15 words in the middle of the screen for every page turn. Or the indentation of the paragraph is not appearing in v2.0 where it used to in v1.9.
- Some of my txt files are showing only the first 3 or 4 pages in v2.0. It's as if the file itself only had 3/4 pages worth of content when I know I was able to get the whole book in v1.9
- Clicking a book to go into it took a really long time, sometimes 15 seconds.
- The very first line on the screen is way too high up (there is no top margin). This wasn't so bad once I got used to it though.

My overall feeling on v2.0 is I want to go back to v1.9 if the books I read is going to have 3 second page turns halfway through reading it.

[Crusader]

Originally Posted by Nina182B

My overall feeling on v2.0 is I want to go back to v1.9 if the books I read is going to have 3 second page turns halfway through reading it.

Have you tried converting the books to ePub? I haven't any slowdowns in books I've read that are formatted as ePubs. You also gain control to be able to add your own margins, page breaks etc.

[bkelly]

I recently purchased an Opus with the intention of using the 2.0 firmware for its EPUB support. But I was so disappointed by the formatting that I gave up on EPUB and went to Mobipocket on v1.5. The issue I experienced was that each page displayed only a very small amount of text because huge margins existed on each side and at the bottom. I tested 4 epub books, from two different ebook stores, and 3 had this issue. The 4th wasn't perfect but it was acceptable. While I know that there's methods for reformatting ebooks (after removing DRM), there's no way that I'm going to do this for a format that's supposed to be a standard. It's amazing to me that although I've been reading ebooks for at least 10-years now, I still feel as though I'm an early adopter!

While I'm ranting, I'll also say that I'm not impressed at all with the Opus platform. The more obvious shortcomings being:
1. The plastic case is too slippery, and having rounded edges only makes this more of an issue. A rubberized surface would be nice to have.
2. The buttons have a cheap feel and sound, are too difficult to press, and they can't be reassigned to fit the user. Also, the multi-directional navigation button is poorly designed (the same button on an Axim X51V is about the same size but is still very easy to use simply because it's designed better).
3. There's no way to simply lock the buttons while leaving the power on. I travel frequently on planes, and several times during each flight I have to set my PDA down (actually I just slip it into my shirt pocket) knowing that I'll pick it up in a few seconds/minutes. It's nice being able to simply lock the buttons instead of powering it off/on. I also use the lockout to ensure that the device doesn't accidentally get powered on when it's stored away in my bag.
4. There's no option for taking the user back to the last-read book/page when the device is powered on. It's a pain having to wait for the device to boot up and then having to re-select the book you were reading. (Man, I sure do sound lazy and spoiled...on that note I think I'll stop here.)

[EowynCarter]

3. There's no way to simply lock the buttons while leaving the power on. I travel frequently on planes, and several times during each flight I have to set my PDA down (actually I just slip it into my shirt pocket) knowing that I'll pick it up in a few seconds/minutes. It's nice being able to simply lock the buttons instead of powering it off/on. I also use the lockout to ensure that the device doesn't accidentally get powered on when it's stored away in my bag.

Good point there.

4. There's no option for taking the user back to the last-read book/page when the device is powered on. It's a pain having to wait for the device to boot up and then having to re-select the book you were reading.

I let mine always one. No more problems.

I recently purchased an Opus with the intention of using the 2.0 firmware for its EPUB support. But I was so disappointed by the formatting that I gave up on EPUB and went to Mobipocket on v1.5. The issue I experienced was that each page displayed only a very small amount of text because huge margins existed on each side and at the bottom. I tested 4 epub books, from two different ebook stores, and 3 had this issue. The 4th wasn't perfect but it was acceptable. While I know that there's methods for reformatting ebooks (after removing DRM), there's no way that I'm going to do this for a format that's supposed to be a standard. It's amazing to me that although I've been reading ebooks for at least 10-years now, I still feel as though I'm an early adopter!

I agree, we should not have to re-edit the ebooks. But until publishers does theirs jobs....

[mjmcleod]

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

I agree, we should not have to re-edit the ebooks. But until publishers does theirs jobs....

I don't see this as being a publisher problem so much as one of getting the rendering engine right. Allow the end-user to over-ride the publisher's formatting choices and the problem goes away and publishers can still do nifty tricks if they want to.

I don't know if this is possible with the Adobe rendering code everyone seems to be using (surely the API allows the passing-in of a custom stylesheet?) so I can't say if this is something for Adobe to do or something for (lazy?) ereader vendors to fix. Either way it's annoying enough that I'm abandoning ePub for Mobipocket until it's sorted.

[EowynCarter]

I don't see this as being a publisher problem so much as one of getting the rendering engine right. Allow the end-user to over-ride the publisher's formatting choices and the problem goes away and publishers can still do nifty tricks if they want to.

Even if being able to change stuff would be nice, if one want some really spesific margins, it's no excuse for the publishers to do thier job that poorly. (And that's not only margins, that's ocr error, bad formating, and all these stuff you see in e-books, and very rarely in p-books.)

[mjmcleod]

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

Even if being able to change stuff would be nice, if one want some really spesific margins, it's no excuse for the publishers to do thier job that poorly. (And that's not only margins, that's ocr error, bad formating, and all these stuff you see in e-books, and very rarely in p-books.)

I'll agree on OCR/etc. I've seen far too many obvious errors in ebooks. It's particularly annoying as they are presumably starting from the same data (i.e., the text in a digital form) for both electronic and print.

But the margin thing seems to be a case of their setting the formatting assuming certain text and display sizes and I'm not sure how much that's a problem with how the publishers specify this stuff and how much is the rendering engine. This seems to be specific to ePub, too.

[EowynCarter]

Originally Posted by mjmcleod

I'll agree on OCR/etc. I've seen far too many obvious errors in ebooks. It's particularly annoying as they are presumably starting from the same data (i.e., the text in a digital form) for both electronic and print.

But the margin thing seems to be a case of their setting the formatting assuming certain text and display sizes and I'm not sure how much that's a problem with how the publishers specify this stuff and how much is the rendering engine. This seems to be specific to ePub, too.

Css can handle that. How do you think website and differants screen size works ? Writing em instead of px is not much of a job.
Plus, i sometimes saw books with really big rght margin, just to avoid the page numbers (useless, as the opus handels that by itself.)

[mjmcleod]

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

Css can handle that. How do you think website and differants screen size works ?
Writing em instead of px is not much of a job.

Yes, I know CSS can handle it, but it looks (from what I'm seeing on the Opus, for example) as though the rendering engine does not allow a custom stylesheet to over-ride what's been included in the ePub book.

That is what's needed to make ePub usable, at least for me anyway.

Having to go in and edit every book is simply not acceptable. Quite apart from the hassle involved it pretty much requires that one strip the DRM, which is presumably not something the publishers are at all keen on...

[EowynCarter]

Having to go in and edit every book is simply not acceptable.

Yes. That's why publishers need to pay more attention to thier job. Though they are not helped by the differants manufacturers dealing with stuff diffrantly.
More than an "orveride what the pubisher says", make sure everyone does stuf the same. And how can publishers format thier books, if the reader just overide everyting afterwards ?

[mjmcleod]

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

More than an "orveride what the pubisher says", make sure everyone does stuf the same. And how can publishers format thier books, if the reader just overide everyting afterwards ?

This is two separate issues.

Consistency in rendering, yes, that's valuable. Can't deny that. I've only used two ePub-capable readers (the Opus and FBReader) so I can't really comment on the state of things there.

Being able to say "the publisher chose a layout which does not work for me, ignore it and use the options I want instead" is a key advantage of electronic books. How well it works depends on the content -- it's perfectly fine for novels, for example, but perhaps rather less so for textbooks with a lot of charts and images.

I come to this from what may a different perspective to most MR participants: I'm part-blind. Publishers typically format for "normal" vision, whether it's ebooks or print. ebooks have the potential to make a whole lot of accessibility issues go away, but not if we wind up applying print limitations to them.

There's more to it than just "you can make the font bigger". This I have learned the hard way.

[EowynCarter]

I come to this from what may a different perspective to most MR participants: I'm part-blind. Publishers typically format for "normal" vision, whether it's ebooks or print. ebooks have the potential to make a whole lot of accessibility issues go away, but not if we wind up applying print limitations to them.

I never saw things that way, but good point.

[Godzil]

Originally Posted by ramboky

Whatever you do DO NOT upgrade to the new 2.0 firmware. I was exactly in your position - I had version 1.9 and upgraded because of occasional lockups. Big mistake. The new firmware is buggy. The most annoying issue is that after the upgrade the reader will no longer be able to read any of the metadata embedded in an epub which means your library page will end up listing your titles by their filename, which looks terrible if your are using Calibre.

Long story short, stay where you are. I wish I had!

Ho yeah that right, you say to people to use a more bugged firmware just because a small cosmeticonly bug?

On the 1.4/1.9 there is too some bugs that can led to loose all the content of you device, so you still prefer to use the "big buggy with metadata" against the "not buggy without metadata" ?


By the way the engine that render TXT/HTML seems to change between the 1.9 and 2.0, maybe due to the new FB2 support