Touch Kobo Touch future firmware feature request thread

[GHG]

I hate to say this and I will no doubt get blasted, but I hope most of these suggestions never make it on to my KT. It's an e-book reader and I would like it to stay that way. If you want all those features I think you should really be looking at a tablet of some type, not a $100 relatively low Res book reader. I am growing very attached to my quad core Android tablet, almost to the point of it replacing my MacBook (well, almost lol) but it is not my book reader. Nothing can replace my KT for reading books. My tablet does a much better job of pdf 's than the KT will ever do. just my 2¢ worth!

[meeera]

GHG: I'm not going to "blast" you (seriously?), but I am going to be slightly bemused at you. Most of the suggestions are minor UI tweaks and fixes, or improvements to ebook management.

Maybe GHG was addressing gearspec's list?

[GHG]

Originally Posted by BWinmill

Maybe GHG was addressing gearspec's list?

Yes, with all due respect, some of them seemed pointless. Why would you use the experimental browser at all, let alone enhance it? Kobo makes an app for just about every mobile platform out there and all have a decent enough browser, at least far superior to the one in the KT. And to use the KT to play games? The processor running at 800mhz and the relatively low refresh rate of the screen add up to a mediocre experience at best.

They could actually take out a bunch of stuff like the browser, the games and all the social reading stuff and make a much tidier device. Lest you misunderstand and think I am unhappy with my KT, let me assure you that I feel quite the opposite. It is an excellent
book reader, even better now that it is stable, and I rarely if ever read print based books now. But it can't, and dare I say, shouldn't try to be something it is not capable of being. Mess with something long enough, and you invariably break it.
This is me climbing down off my soapbox now.

[Orn8one]

A wee point on the usefulness of the 'experimental browser'. I often read when out and about on my iPad, my preference isto read on my KT but it would be one more thing to stuff in the work case. I often have nights away when my KT needs updating, this would be impossible without the 'experimental browser'. Most hotel wifi starts with a web page to accept the T&C's. This can be a mission on the 'experimental browser' but it is possible. I look forward to the day when it is not 'experimental' but only for that purpose.
I would like to have the ability to 'not ever see' all the social stuff. I have it disabled but, while i understand it is important to many, i would prefer all options to disappear!

[meeera]

Also, a working, user-friendly browser on a KT means you can sideload books from a Calibre content server without plugging in. This might not be mission-critical for most people, sure, but still handy if you'd use it - as I would.

[Akerbos]

I agree with GHG: keep it simple, keep it clean. I want to reading device, not a small PC.

Originally Posted by Jaden

But [deletion is] slow and tedious. I prefer to do it on my computer.

Note that if you just remove the files, thumbnails and the like are not deleted and will accumulate over time.

[Jaden]

Originally Posted by Akerbos

Note that if you just remove the files, thumbnails and the like are not deleted and will accumulate over time.

And you have to manually remove them using your computer. But you'll have to do that no matter what method you used to delete your book.

That's another thing they could improve, which should be possible. If the Kobo creates the files/pictures when adding books, it should also remove them when you delete the book (maybe when shutting the Kobo down next time or when syncing next time...).

[gearspec]

Originally Posted by GHG

I hate to say this and I will no doubt get blasted, but I hope most of these suggestions never make it on to my KT. It's an e-book reader and I would like it to stay that way. If you want all those features I think you should really be looking at a tablet of some type, not a $100 relatively low Res book reader. I am growing very attached to my quad core Android tablet, almost to the point of it replacing my MacBook (well, almost lol) but it is not my book reader. Nothing can replace my KT for reading books. My tablet does a much better job of pdf 's than the KT will ever do. just my 2¢ worth!

Well, its serves its main purpose very well, which is simply reading books and not killing my eyes or having to carry a bag at the university. I don't mind if any of my suggestions don't make it any of the firmware upgrade. But I wish the browser was not experimental. KT has enough charge to do wifi and browsing for weeks. None of the LED based tablets can do this. And it also helps when you only need to carry one thing.

[hooplehead]

Hi everyone!

I got my Kobo Touch a few weeks ago, after having spent 2 months using the Sony PRS-T1 of my fathers. The Sony is the better reader, but I'm not sure it's worth the 40 EUR on top of the Kobo. Depends how future updates will improve the Kobo...

I hope this is the right thread for my bug reports/feature requests. I have to admit, I haven't read all 57 pages... I'm running the latest firmware 1.9.17, reading only sidealong uploaded ePubs up to now.


1) Probably most annoying: Font/page settings like size, margin etc. are global settings. I'm reading two books, if I set the font size on one and switch to the other, fonts become about 3 sizes too big. Why no per-book setting?
Same goes for dictionary setting. If I have my Kobo set to English, I always get English/French. If I set it to English/German, this setting is only kept in that reading session. Close the book or switch books and the setting isn't even kept globally (which would be bad enough), but forgotten altogether.


2) Close to most annoying: footnote jumping almost doesn't work. I first thought it was impossible altogether, but as I read it should work somewhat, I kept trying different footnotes in the same book and managed to jump about once in 20 tries....
The Sony had no problems there: layed over a light grey background those links are easy to spot and one tap jumped. The Kobo 19/20 of times just pages forward/backward.

I guess the big difference here is that the Sony uses swiping motions for paging (works 100%!) and thus leaves taps for things like following links. I guess it's a no-no for Kobo because of licensing/patenting or such insanity. Probably owned/litigatable by Apple...


3) The Kobo dictionary often draws a blank while Sony's Oxford English Dictionary is perfect. It's pretty hopeless. If I don't know a word, chances are the Kobo dictionary doesn't either...


4) I lay a book away for a few minutes, come back and continue reading. Sometimes the sleep-mode kicks in before I'm finished with the page and tap to turn the page, resetting the sleep timer. How about a quick countdown before entering sleep-mode, giving me the opportunity to cancel and continue reading?


5) Searching a marked word takes too long, as it apparently runs thru the whole book. Better: search either forwards or backwards to the next/previous occurance and offer the list of all findings as an option.


6) Hitting the home button could cache the current page of the book. That way the loading time is removed when you come back to the book .


That should be enough for a first batch...
I didn't mention the known favourites, like margins and the most annoying ignored taps. Those should be fixed ASAP.


I hope a few Kobo devs read this and deem some things worthwhile to add in future releases.
Should I mail the above to Kobo's costumer care, so they could forward it to the right department? Coindicentally I just finished filling out a poll in a Kobo newsletter where I mentioned the above points. Maybe we're heard... Kobo, do you copy?

hooplehead

[tshering]

Originally Posted by Autumn Corvus

Please please please create a simple option to export annotations as a text file of some sort, this is really essential for students and researchers!

Autumn

In case somebody is still interested in this question. This is one way to export annotations/highlights from KT to a text file. From the description it might seem a little tiresome, but as soon as you did the preparing steps once, the usage is very easy.

Download the sqlite3 programm from http://www.sqlite.org/download.html and unzip it into C:\kobotest\.

Create a file "work.bat" with the following content:
(begin of content)
sqlite3 KoboReader.sqlite < extr_annotations.txt
(end of content)

Create another file "extr_annotations.txt" with the following content:
(begin of content)
.output annotations.txt
SELECT Text, Annotation
FROM Bookmark
WHERE VolumeID LIKE "%%pg37873-images.epub";
.exit
(end of content)

Do not type "(begin of content)" and "(end of content)". I put them here just for clarification. Replace "pg37873-images.epub" with the filename of the epub you want to extract the annotations from.

Connect the KT to the computer and copy the file "KoboReader.sqlite" from KT (e.g. "G:\.kobo\KoboReader.sqlite", in my case) to "C:\kobotest\".

In "C:\kobotest\", there should now be the following files:
sqlite3.exe
KoboReader.sqlite
work.bat
extr_annotations.txt

Double click on "work.bat". After some split seconds you will find in the same folder a file named "annotations.txt". Open it with MSWord or WordPad. The Editor does not show the file nicely. The text file is encoded in utf8, so you can use it for instance for Chinese and Japanese too.

[pwarren]

Ok, another request for folders, or some sort of hierarchical sorting. Coming from an EcoReader, I had no idea how much I liked that I could see a list of authors, then drill down to find all books by that author.

Other than that, Quite impressed with my Kobo Touch.

Oh, and please add back the top margin that I had before it updated to *.17.

Edit: You can detect I've loaded books onto the onboard storage, surely you can see I've removed some, and hence get them out of my library?

[janpeeters]

My list of requests is the following:

- Organize, organize, organize! Books in categories, folders or collections.
- Being able to change the home screen of the Kobo. I'm not a big fan of the book collage and would prefer to see a list view of my shortlist.
- The same font/line-height/etc view for all sorts of EPUBs (side loaded books as well as Kobo desktop books). It varies a lot per book if this is possible and to what extend.
- And besides that a typography override per book would be nice. So if you tick a box, you can set custom typography settings.
- PDF reflow, very important to have readable views of PDFs.
- A Kobo Desktop app that let's me load/add free EPUBs from other sources. If you're worked about piracy, do it like Apple iTunes. They allow you to do it, but what you load into it is your responsibility.
- Landscape mode for EPUBs
- Dutch for translatations in dictionary.

- The website states that Kobo Touch supports MOBI, but I've not been able to read a DRM-less MOBI on my Touch. Am I missing something?

Thanks to the devs and moderators for their great work!

Jan

[BensonBear]

Originally Posted by janpeeters

Organize, organize, organize! Books in categories, folders or collections.

Can you say why, exactly, you need to do this?

PDF reflow, very important to have readable views of PDFs.

What exactly do you mean by "PDF reflow"? PDF format in general gives a two dimensional stretch of stuff, perhaps multiple columns, perhaps little text boxes and image boxes all over the place with no clear order, perhaps headers and footers in various formats, perhaps footnotes at the bottom of the page, or notes or other indicators in the margins, etc. How in general is this all to be recognized and then "reflowed"?

[janpeeters]

Hi BensonBear,

Thanks for your questions, let me clarify.
Yesterdays new 2.0 update gives me shelves, that's a really great improvement. The functionality and interaction design of shelves is nicely done. The UI implementation could have been better. I want to select shelves quickly from my home screen if possible. Maybe in a dropdown menu. Now it's quite a few clicks away.

The reason that I wanted to be able to organize was that with big libraries it takes a lot of time to find a book (e.g. if you don't recall the title or author search is useless). So knowing that it was about psychology or natural science makes it easier to retrieve. But this request can be seen as fulfilled for know.

Your second question about the PDF reflow...
Apps like GoodReader on Apple iOS have the possibility to reflow the text. This means that the text get's ripped out of the PDF and redrawn so that you're not stuck with small characters on long lines or have to scroll through a line of text to read the PDF. It starts behaving like a normal ebook, where you can change typesize, lineheight etc.

Hope this clarifies it.

My list has changed with the 2.0 release:

- Being able to change the home screen of the Kobo. I'm not a big fan of the book collage and would prefer to see a list view of my shortlist or shelves.
- The same font/line-height/etc view for all sorts of EPUBs (side loaded books as well as Kobo desktop books). It varies a lot per book if this is possible and to what extend.
- And besides that a typography override per book would be nice. So if you tick a box, you can set custom typography settings.
- PDF reflow, very important to have readable views of PDFs.
- A Kobo Desktop app that let's me load/add free EPUBs from other sources. If you're worked about piracy, do it like Apple iTunes. They allow you to do it, but what you load into it is your responsibility.
- Landscape mode for EPUBs
- Dutch for translations in dictionary.

- The website states that Kobo Touch supports MOBI, but I've not been able to read a DRM-less MOBI on my Touch. Am I missing something?
Update: I've found that it does support .mobi, but the epub is still preferred.


Jan