Collections and items at once in list view

[ntamas]

Hi!

In older firmwares of PW3 there was a way to have collections in a list view like this:

Collections were at the beginning of the list, then under the Collections the list of "uncollected" items started with the most recent ones in a descending order.

Now this has been gone I can only see something similar if I set the view option to "Collections", but in this case as a matter of fact I get a grid view with an extra "Uncollected" item which is not expanded as it was in the list views of previous versions.
I prefer list view to grid view so I don't like this "solution".
Is there a way to get back the older behaviour or shall I go without it?

Of course not all of the items are organized in collections and in list view with Collections on I won't get the uncollected items listed and if I turn the Collections off then the Collections won't be separated from other items to the beginning of the list.

[shamanNS]

Originally Posted by ntamas

Is there a way to get back the older behaviour or shall I go without it?

Unfortunately the only way to get old behavior would be to go back to older firmware, and to be able to do that you would first need to jailbreak your PW3 and then downgrade the firmware and block future firmware updates.

[ntamas]

Hmm.. and I guess it must be very complicated. Though I like experimenting with devices but this was too expensive just to "brick" it.

[Joykins]

You can't get the old behavior back. I tried *everything*. I've resorted to using the list view that has the Collections interspersed with the books, and filtering things on Read/Unread (I had been assigning them to Collections after reading them).

[ntamas]

Bad news. Thank you, anyway.

[A Lurker]

I've been disappointed with nearly every change they've made to the firmware. In addition to losing the ability to see collections in list view (as you described), I'm also upset that you now have to scroll through pages of books. In the past, you could direct it to go to the page where the author/titles start with whatever letter you pick. You could also reset the furthest page read. Etc.

[ntamas]

Oh yes, as I was reading your message, another annoying "function" came to my mind, the "Stay here" option that sometimes appears in the right bottom corner of a book.

There are two scenarios for this:

1. If you look up a word in a dictionary (I mean if you definitely open the dictionary itself) and it has a link to another "page" (I know it isn't a page, but I can't find the right word for it), you jump there and earlier you could go back from the menu to the previous position and it didn't show anything like "Stay here". If you followed those links for example throughout a dictionary combined with thesaurus, then you were able to jump back to all those previous positions and at the same time you also had the ability to exit to the main list.

Now if you follow links in a dictionary, the "Stay here" shit appears always and you can only go back with "back to location" to just ONE position (thus this Stay here "status bar" is completely unnecessary) and you can jump back further via the arrow in the top left corner, but in this case you can't exit right to the main list, but instead you have to follow all your links back to the position where you opened the dictionary (this is that ONE offered by that "status bar"). Really annoying!

2. There are a lot of links in gamebooks as well. In this case though you won't get an arrow preventing you from exiting the book, but instead you'll get this "Stay here" bar by "clicking on" each link and it "saves" only the original location you have started the book from.
So it simply just prevents you from "cheating" but you might want to reread something or deliberately choose another path or option (aka cheat) then from now on you need to use "bookmarks"... For an activity that hasn't required bookmarking so far.

[ivar]

And you cant switch list/grid view in collection.
I dont understand why they lost ability to go next/previous chater swiping up/down.

Of course this ntamas described problem are biggest.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by ivar

I dont understand why they lost ability to go next/previous chapter swiping up/down.

That was never a Kindle feature. With some other reading apps (KOReader maybe?), yes.

Swipe up from bottom edge (about an inch) reveals a scroll control with chapter navigation buttons. It's been that way for a long time (since Page View was introduced).

...

With the Android/Fire Kindle app, Collections view is restricted to Grid (thumbnail) view, but once you open a collection you can choose either Grid or List. They could add that option to Kindle too, and keep 'cross platform consistency' (which seems to be a goal with some of these UI changes).

But Kindle for iOS doesn't have this feature. And it has no Sort options (apart from manually dragging the thumbnails into the desired order). It's been this way for a long time.

Conversely, you can apply Filters when viewing a Collection on Kindle. You cannot do that with the apps for Android or iOS (not even ALL | DOWNLOADED toggle that Kindles had before it became a Filter option).

I'm all for more consistency across platforms. If it were up to me I would take the Android implementation and add ability to filter, and make Kindle/iOS/Android (eventually Windows/macOS) have the same collections look and feel.

That said, I barely use Collections myself: they are okay for some use cases, but aren't very flexible, or scalable. I think that's true for most reading platforms (e.g. Apple Books has a very similar implementation). No use complaining about it.

If you want or need more flexibility and scalability in 'organizing', Pocketbook (and I'm guessing Kobo) might be a better choice.

PocketBook, for example, pays attention to Series, Genre metadata and to file system folders. Calibre can manage the metadata.

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by tomsem

That was never a Kindle feature.

What we did have was the next/prev buttons on the Kindle 4 and earlier, which could switch chapters, and nice chapter markers on the bottom-of-screen progress bar, also now gone. And now we've even lost the back button, so if you want to flip back to look at the start of a long article in a periodical you can't get back to where you were again! What idiot designed this?!

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by NullNix

And now we've even lost the back button, ...

The back button is one of the best features about using a kindle. They seem to be on a quest to ruin the kindle experience as much as possible.

(And oh how I miss the progress bar and the 4-way nav button.)

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by NullNix

What we did have was the next/prev buttons on the Kindle 4 and earlier, which could switch chapters, and nice chapter markers on the bottom-of-screen progress bar, also now gone. And now we've even lost the back button, so if you want to flip back to look at the start of a long article in a periodical you can't get back to where you were again! What idiot designed this?!

I could jump start my 1975 Honda Civic (with dead battery) by giving it a push, jumping in the car, and popping the clutch. But my Prius has no clutch pedal! What idiot designed it?

(In fact, when Prius starter battery dies, you cannot unlock the doors with the wireless key fob or pop the rear hatch to get to the starter battery. Have to use a physical key to unlock one of the front doors, crawl over the seats to get back there, remove whatever's in the way of the rear hatch access panel, pop that off, flip the manual release, and finally you can remove the panel for battery access and clip on your starter cables. But by god it's a thousand times the car the Civic was, I got 500K miles on my first one before a minor collision effectively totaled it.)

To me it's apples and oranges comparison to compare ancient K4 to the current lineup. I just got a K4 (my mom wasn't using it) and it is a curiosity. The few things that might be a little better about it don't make up for how unpleasant it is to actually use when compared to the newer ones. The battery is shot, I'm going to trade it in.

I'm sorry they made it more difficult to navigate Kindle periodicals, but I'm sure they know how many people subscribe to these and it's probably a very tiny number. Reworking a 15 year old format or touching the equally old code for it would risk breaking things even worse. I retired my last Kindle subscription, Science News, several years ago, and it is far more pleasant to read it on a tablet or phone and doesn't cost any more.

[ntamas]

Originally Posted by NullNix

And now we've even lost the back button, so if you want to flip back to look at the start of a long article in a periodical you can't get back to where you were again! What idiot designed this?!

Yes and at the same time we have also lost the "memory" of that back button too. Position recording in a book was also a feature we still need I guess. As I mentioned earlier concerning gamebooks.