DR800S: Reasons for PDF-Zoom function (was: ePub bug?)

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by Matthijs

BTW: what is your use-case for zooming?
If you're reading books, reflow will work much nicer than zoom.

(maybe we should split this into a new topic?)

Technical and Business PDFs where re-flow loses crucial formatting. Think tables and equations and the like. It's not a capability that's absolutely crucial for me, but it would help to justify the $150 increase in price over the alternative readers that you compete with (in terms of my preferences and budget).

The bigger screen helps justify that higher price (for me), but not enough. If I could also read and annotate technical papers, it'd be a no-brainer purchase. Without that capability, I'm really reaching to justify the extra cost (and physical size, which is a problem). And if it also had a flexible back-plane for the screen to reduce the likelihood of breakage—at the same price, of course—I'd be pre-ordering without worrying about justifying the added cost. But such screens are made of unobtanium at the moment, so...

Xenophon

[christof.s]

I would like to support the point made by a few people here. The DR800 would be just perfect for me, too, if it had PDF Zoom and annotation. I love the size (good compromise) and the design. I don't even really need Wifi or 3G.

However, I am reading a lot of PDFs (scientific papers, older literary texts from Google Books) that do not necessarily have a lot of graphs, but which do not support reflow, since they are essentially image-based PDFs, and whose text size is usually too small for reading at 100%.

I am certainly not going to buy a DR1000 (too big, too expensive), and don't like the Sony 700 (too small, screen contrast not perfect), but would order a DR800 right now, as in this very second, if there was PDF zoom and annotation.

Christof

[Mr. Goodbar]

Originally Posted by christof.s

I would like to support the point made by a few people here. The DR800 would be just perfect for me, too, if it had PDF Zoom and annotation. I love the size (good compromise) and the design. I don't even really need Wifi or 3G.

However, I am reading a lot of PDFs (scientific papers, older literary texts from Google Books) that do not necessarily have a lot of graphs, but which do not support reflow, since they are essentially image-based PDFs, and whose text size is usually too small for reading at 100%.

I am certainly not going to buy a DR1000 (too big, too expensive), and don't like the Sony 700 (too small, screen contrast not perfect), but would order a DR800 right now, as in this very second, if there was PDF zoom and annotation.

Christof

Good point on Google books. We also seem to see more classic digitization efforts to preserve the look and feel of the regular text. If pdf is the preferred format for these efforts a good zoom function would be a requirement on any serious reader.

[badbob001]

In regards to Zoom, it's not a technical issue but a marketing issue.

If zoom is unnecessary because of reflow, then a larger higher resolution device is also unnecessary in the market. The PRS-900's larger screen is marketed as supporting a two-page view. What is IREX's marketing justification for their larger screen device? The possibility for insanely larger fonts than the competition for use by the visually challenged? For people who love large margins? You can't just throw a piece of hardware out there with no clear market focus and just hope someone buys it accidentally.

Until recently with the introduction of support for EPUB, PDF is the primary supported document for IREX devices. PDF documents sometimes supports reflow but the specification allows for documents that do not reflow well, and so zoom is needed, aided by larger screen sizes. Despite EPUB, PDF viewing is still important and good support for it is a nice marketing point against the competition (ie: show a comparison shot of a PDF document on the DR800 compared to the competition). Also note that it's more likely that personal documents will be in PDF format (ie: print to PDF).

[etienne66]

I think they should get the dictionary, annotation and some sort of zoom feature added. Something like the Kindle zoom where it crops the white space and fits the width in landscape mode would suffice for me.

Then they should market it towards universities and schools as a textbook replacement. I think it would be outstanding for that if they add these 3 basic features. I haven't gone to school in a while, but I would like to use it with technical training pdfs. This device could be perfect for students, but not with its current feature set.

Etienne66

[mrscoach]

I am a college student looking for a reading device, and my textbooks are not reflowable. I have to be able to zoom when I read, because my books have these crazy big margins.

I'm not sure what device I will end up with, but zoom is important.

[DeReader]

Originally Posted by Matthijs

I tried your EPUB here internally on our development version and there it works correctly. I'm not sure what causes this bug, but at least we know it will be solved by the next firmware update.
Sorry for the inconvenience.

Matthijs, thank you very much for trying, fine to have the issue fixed in the next firmware version.

And for zooming on the DR800: I read primary PDF files, those have often large borders and so the screen area of the reader is not fully utilized and the font size to small to read. This was no problem on the Iliad, I could easily zoom in the text portion I wanted and the original layout was still there.

I help myself atm with cropping the borders of the PDFs manually before copying them on the device. But that's really a tedious process.

If I use reflow the page layout is destroyed, vector graphics are not displayed (like diagrams, there's only the text portion left).

I want to read books in their original layout. Typography and layout is an important aspect for me, even in a technical book.

So please include the zoom function in a forthcoming firmware release, it would make a lot of users very happy and potential buyers have another argument in favour of the DR800.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by badbob001

In regards to Zoom, it's not a technical issue but a marketing issue.

If zoom is unnecessary because of reflow, then a larger higher resolution device is also unnecessary in the market. The PRS-900's larger screen is marketed as supporting a two-page view. What is IREX's marketing justification for their larger screen device? The possibility for insanely larger fonts than the competition for use by the visually challenged? For people who love large margins? You can't just throw a piece of hardware out there with no clear market focus and just hope someone buys it accidentally.

Until recently with the introduction of support for EPUB, PDF is the primary supported document for IREX devices. PDF documents sometimes supports reflow but the specification allows for documents that do not reflow well, and so zoom is needed, aided by larger screen sizes. Despite EPUB, PDF viewing is still important and good support for it is a nice marketing point against the competition (ie: show a comparison shot of a PDF document on the DR800 compared to the competition). Also note that it's more likely that personal documents will be in PDF format (ie: print to PDF).

I primarily read PDFs, prefer the larger 8" screen size of my iLiad, and rarely (if ever) use the zoom feature. I'm not sure why you think that one would require the other, or why there wouldn't be any justification for it.

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by Shaggy

I primarily read PDFs, prefer the larger 8" screen size of my iLiad, and rarely (if ever) use the zoom feature.

The iLiad has a very rich set of capabilities for PDF. You are probably using some "advanced" feature, such as autocroping or manual cropping or continuous mode or whatever. In contrast, the DR800S has very few PDF capabilities - it has no usable landscape mode at all for example (Unboxing iRex 800 and first impressions).

[repods]

Originally Posted by Matthijs

BTW: what is your use-case for zooming?
If you're reading books, reflow will work much nicer than zoom.

(maybe we should split this into a new topic?)

for me this is wrong..
I read only pdf ebooks for example (and almost 50% of e-reader buyers do the same in my opinion) and I want to get the text as much big as possible from the e-reader, being the page of the real book usually bigger than the screen. Usually the books, the technical ones, have a lot of white space at the margins; space that I don't need.. but i don't want to loose the nice and professional formatting of the book itself.. so I want zooming instead of reflow..

even the possibility of having bigger text when rotating 90° would have been a sort of trade-off..

it's a pity that at last you made a unit that is not defective from the hardware perspective and you are keeping it down for marketing reasons..

I personally will never buy a dr1000 (that btw I tried personally) because it's a defective product from the hardware side..
-the battery life it's ridiculous
-the capacitative buttons are unusable and difficult to aim
-there is some noise when you read..
-the scribble and note taking is not good enough (not very interested in this)

instead the dr800 is good from the hardware side,and personally I would buy it if it had a good zoom for pdf, even without scribble.

[FutureBSD]

Same from my site.
I already wanted to order this device but thought it might be a good idea just to wait some more weeks. Now that I'm reading that the guys of iRex still don't know if they're going to implement pdf zoom and annotation I'm not going to buy this device until they implement it.
I'm also NOT buying a DR1000. It's ugly, expensive and to big for what I want it for.

The DR800S(G) would be a perfect device if it had a pdf zoom + annotation feature. Great size, pretty fast, nice design and the price would be totally ok with this features. Without those features it totally overpriced.

As long as iRex is not talking about implementing this features, or better, as long as the two features are not available (because they already promised them and now they don't know if they will implement them) I'll wait and see what else is entering the market. If there will be another comparable device I'll buy it right away.

For iRex those kind of games could be a real killer. Overpriced devices (because of missing features), missing features, promising things that they don't deliver etc.
They should start thinking of gaining some market shares with the devices like the DR800S(G) that have comparable features like the competitor. I'm pretty sure they can gain a lot of market share as long as they implement what they promise. The devices are great. They look awesome (except the DR1000 ;-)). They are fast. The quality is great. The prices are ok. I'd expect the DR800S(G) to be THE eInk reader on the market if it has pdf zoom + annotation.

Just my 2 cents

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by Matthijs

If you're reading books, reflow will work much nicer than zoom.

When it works, reflow is often better than zoom. However, it can fail on a page by page basis if there are illustrations (i.e. some pages don't get reflowed at all). It can also fail on some text only PDFs, where Adobe's reflow can't get over hard returns at the end of each line and produces terribly formatted text (lines breaking at any point in a word).

[HansTWN]

I have several PDF books with lots of photos in them, reflow doesn't work. With a DR 800 with zoom capabilities those would not represent a problem. It would also be great for newspapers. And yes, for text reflow doesn't always work well. Everybody who has tried zoom is happy with it.

I really like the DR 800's screen size to device size ratio. With zoom and annotation features I would buy it, but without I think the Plastic Logic is a better deal. After all it even includes WiFi and is a lot cheaper than the DR1000. So Irex is losing a lot of business for the 800 (among MR members) because of these decisions. The DR 1000 is really not on the menu for me unless the price is lowered significantly and the battery life improves.

[eLiNK]

Same here. For the reasons already stated, I would buy the DR800S right away, if it had pdf zoom and annotation features: Without them, the device is crippled.

The soon to be available Lbook's A9 has a richer feature set and will cost significantly less.
But I expect that its build quality won't be an par with the DR800S(G).

P.S.: looks like it would be easier to rename the thread.

[DeReader]

Originally Posted by eLiNK

P.S.: looks like it would be easier to rename the thread.

I tried to rename the thread title, but somehow it is not reflected globally. If anybody has a hint for me how to do it right, a PM would be fine.