Kobo Glo HD

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Josieb1

I'd be very grateful for the files if you don't mind. I'm running 3.12.1 right now.

I'll post both sets of patches for 3.12.1 and 3.13.1 Monday night or Tuesday. I don't have them on my Surface and I won't have access to them until sometime Monday.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by kacir

I hope that hyphenation does work even with the left justified texts.
I can't see why it shouldn't.

I would also like to see what is the margin at minimal setting.

With the patches, the minimal margin can be whatever you want. The patches have them at a setting of 0 for minimal. I think they might go up to 8. Not entirely sure. Cannot check until I am able to access the patches and copy them to my surface.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Mercador

Would you explain me the difference? I notice that the Aura might be tricky when it comes to turn pages sometimes so if this will fix that, that would be nice.

Still, I like the flat bezel of the Aura...

Some people have issues with capacitance touch. IR uses inferred beams to tell where you are touching. That's why the screen is sunken to allow room for the IR transmitters/receivers.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by pssquirrel

Not helping!

You WANT a Glo HD that has user installable fonts. You WANT a Glo HD that has kerning support (as long as the font has it). You WANT built-in hyphenation. You WANT move advanced controls. You WANT more font sizes. You WANT a Glo HD that costs around the same price as a PW2. You WANT IR touch. You WANT ePub. You WANT a Glo HD. You WANT to sell your Voyage. You WANT a better font light that doesn't have color shifting that you DO notice. You WANT to let Amazon know that they are charging to much for the Voyage. You WANT to have a Glo HD because it's hip, it's trendy, it's now, it's the in device.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Skew

I am worried about the gloss band inside the bezel. It is reflecting a fair amount of the light from the camera or whichever light source is in this video, so if you're using the unit outside, I could imagine you could easily have sunlight reflected into your eyes according to which angle you hold the unit.

I have an H2O which has the same gloss band inside the bezel and I've used my H2O inside in different lighting, outside, and in the car. The band has never once been an issue. I has never reflected glare. So don't worry about it as it is a non-issue.

[ryuji35]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

You WANT a Glo HD that has user installable fonts. You WANT a Glo HD that has kerning support (as long as the font has it). You WANT move advanced controls. You WANT more font sizes. You WANT a Glo HD that costs around the same price as a PW2. You WANT IR touch. You WANT ePub. You WANT a Glo HD. You WANT to sell your Voyage. You WANT a better font light that doesn't have color shifting that you DO notice. You WANT to let Amazon know that they are charging to much for the Voyage. You WANT to have a Glo HD because it's hip, it's trendy, it's now, it's the in device.

Not sure if you're just a very very persuasive salesman or you are already using hypnosis

[pssquirrel]

Originally Posted by 6charlong

It's really straight forward. Kobo uses separate programs to render books in .epub (e.g., It.epub) and .kepub (It.kepub). The extension instructs the reader which program to use. All you need to do to change the rendering program is change the extension: FROM It.epub TO It.epub.kepub. Internally the text that makes up the actual book is the same for both.

You don't need Calibre or anything else except Finder on your Mac: change the extension and save the file to Dropbox and it will download as a kepub, or leave it .epub and Kobo will use the universal standard.

Whoah. Are you telling me the only difference between an epub and kepub is the extension? And the only reason it's different is because the Kobo reader has two different renderers and the extension tells the reader which renderer to use?

If that's the case, what's all this talk about using Calibre to convert to kepub and a kepub output plug-in? Is all that just to change the extension?

Though if it's as simple as that, the Glo HD is looking more appealing to me again.

[pssquirrel]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

You WANT a Glo HD that has user installable fonts. You WANT a Glo HD that has kerning support (as long as the font has it). You WANT built-in hyphenation. You WANT move advanced controls. You WANT more font sizes. You WANT a Glo HD that costs around the same price as a PW2. You WANT IR touch. You WANT ePub. You WANT a Glo HD. You WANT to sell your Voyage. You WANT a better font light that doesn't have color shifting that you DO notice. You WANT to let Amazon know that they are charging to much for the Voyage. You WANT to have a Glo HD because it's hip, it's trendy, it's now, it's the in device.

Originally Posted by ryuji35

Not sure if you're just a very very persuasive salesman or you are already using hypnosis

I must admit I'm feeling hypnotically swayed toward the Glo HD right now.

However, with regard to this patching thing -- which I still find daunting -- does Kobo still force firmware updates on you? And what happens if/when that happens? Does the reader go wonky until you update the patch?

[MGlitch]

It does seem to force updates, there's usually an experimental patch to disable wifi updates. And yes the reader reverts to pre-patch settings until you re-patch. However Geoff is pretty quick about getting a patcher out for the new firmware.

[rjcroy]

All this talk of epub vs kepub and firmware patches reminds me how immature this ebook technology still is. Truly mature technology just works. Obviously I don't mind too much--I like technology and I'm willing to edit CSS files to get ebooks looking decent. But when I'm doing it do think 'this is a little crazy'. But I have thought ever since I started reading on ereaders 5 years ago, that this technology is still brittle, and not truly user friendly.

Maybe on a Kindle you don't have this problem. But then their typography engine is so primitive that clearly they have a long way to go too.

[Ripplinger]

When I don't want the forced firmware updates (I stayed with 2.4.0 for over 1.5 years!), I just keep the wifi off. That works for me perfectly since I prefer to buy all my books through my PC only and sideload all books to my readers and never feel the need to use a browser when I want to read. That may not be an ideal setup for you though. I haven't tried any patches though to keep the wifi updates away. One thing high on my wishlist is a way to disable updates on Kobo readers.

The patching is pretty easy on Kobo readers, you're not rooting the device at all. And GeoffR has done all the hard work for us already, you just turn on the patches you want by changing 'no' to 'yes' for those patches. It's really pretty painless, but gives you so much more control over things like top and bottom margins, which natively are just too big in Kobo's firmware, fonts and other display options.

And for what it's worth, I much prefer sticking to epubs and not bothering with Kobo's kepubs. I don't need something telling me I've spent 4 hrs 32 minutes reading a book, or whatever other stats it gives you. That's got nothing to do with reading for me at all.

[Josieb1]

Originally Posted by pssquirrel

Uh-oh. This may be a deal-breaker. If I got a Glo HD it would be for epubs. At this point I'm already juggling epub and azw3, and I'd like to avoid adding another format (kepub) to the mix.

Also, I'm not really into patching/hacking my devices. I prefer being able to use my ereaders out-of-the-box without having to tinker with firmware to get what I want. (Also, I only skimmed the beginning of the developer threads, but am I reading correctly that the Kobo Patcher is Windows-only, or is a Mac version now available as well? If Windows-only, then this is even more of a deal-breaker

I added two plug ins to Calibre for Kobo (although I think you may only need one. I can give you their names if you want them. All I do is send to my kobo device and calibre sends kePub even though I have ePub in calibre, and calibre uses my bookshelves as collections.

There are a couple of changes I made to the configure file though, one that gives full screen (I.e no header or trailer) if you want it and another than prevents kobo from mucking up and duplicating the collections.

You can use a kobo straight out of the box but these changes I made make it a better experience. I haven't used the kobo patcher and I doubt I would, I don't like playing too much with code. What I've done is enough.

I also added my own font.

[Josieb1]

Originally Posted by rjcroy

All this talk of epub vs kepub and firmware patches reminds me how immature this ebook technology still is. Truly mature technology just works. Obviously I don't mind too much--I like technology and I'm willing to edit CSS files to get ebooks looking decent. But when I'm doing it do think 'this is a little crazy'. But I have thought ever since I started reading on ereaders 5 years ago, that this technology is still brittle, and not truly user friendly.

Maybe on a Kindle you don't have this problem. But then their typography engine is so primitive that clearly they have a long way to go too.

The problem is kobo displays epubs differently to their own version of ePub which is kepub. With epubs you get text straight to the top of the page with a really big gap at the bottom. Kepub, which normally you buy through kobo look like the normal page of a book.

With kindle Amazon ebooks and personals ebooks display the same. Amazon has a lot less choices with regard to display but they are better for a straight out of the box usage, and personal docs can be simply emailed to your kindle which is easy to understand for most people.

[Josieb1]

If we are talking about straight out of the box and no tinkering then this is my view.

I don't buy my books from Amazon or Kobo, I buy them from independant retailers, I can download mobi or ePub. If I didn't have Calibre I could still email my mobi books to my kindle, they would work exactly as Amazon bought books do. I would keep the files on a folder on my PC. (much as I do now which is in addition to Calibre) and access the book on both my kindle and my fire.

For kobo I would have to transfer by USB or use Dropbox (remember no Calibre). I wouldn't like the way epubs display but I'd have to live with it. Also I'd have problems syncing with kobo for any bought books as that peskie multiple collections bug was back last time kobo updated the desktop. I know that as I've had to patch it out.

So my 'out of the box' experiance would be much worse with kobo than with Amazon. I know a lot of you wouldn't agree with me but its patching the config file and calibre sending kepubs that makes Kobo work for me.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by pssquirrel

Whoah. Are you telling me the only difference between an epub and kepub is the extension? And the only reason it's different is because the Kobo reader has two different renderers and the extension tells the reader which renderer to use?

If that's the case, what's all this talk about using Calibre to convert to kepub and a kepub output plug-in? Is all that just to change the extension?

Though if it's as simple as that, the Glo HD is looking more appealing to me again.

That's what Jon is saying, but he isn't completely right. Changing the extension will do what Jon says, but the reading position and bookmarks won't work correctly.

In a kepub, each sentence is wrapped in a span. This has an id. The location system uses these ids. If you just change the extension, when you close and reopen a book, you will always be taken to the start of the chapter you were up to. And any annotations stored will not be redisplayed in the book. The plugins add the spans to the epubs. The plugin also adds some extra divs and CSS that the kepub ereader expects and helps with the way it does the formatting.

Note that the kepub is still a valid epub. If you opened it with any other epub reader it would be OK.