Kobo x ray

[cliffwalker62]

I find the x ray feature on Kindle really useful.For me it’s the only advantage it has.Why can’t Kobo do anything similar?

[JSWolf]

Because not enough people have requested it and Kobo doesn't see it as useful. These are just guesses.

[davidfor]

Because it is a LOT of work. Which means it costs a lot and they probably could not justify it.

Kobo did have something similar, called "BtB" if I remember correctly. Unfortunately, they didn't have it for many books, and it only lasted a year or so. The effort required to make it useful has to be big. I don't know how Amazon handless it. Or do they just do it for the very popular books and no one comments on it for everything else.

[shalym]

Originally Posted by davidfor

Because it is a LOT of work. Which means it costs a lot and they probably could not justify it.

Kobo did have something similar, called "BtB" if I remember correctly. Unfortunately, they didn't have it for many books, and it only lasted a year or so. The effort required to make it useful has to be big. I don't know how Amazon handless it. Or do they just do it for the very popular books and no one comments on it for everything else.

I just checked, and 7 out of the last 10 books I bought from Amazon had X-Ray enabled. 2 of the 3 that didn't were collections of short stories from long dead authors, and the third was a free self published book.

Note that the books I buy are not generally best sellers, they are a combination of mysteries, science fiction, and biographies.

Shari

[Quoth]

Also some people find the Kindle Xray is inaccurate and a gimmick.

We don't bother with it on books we publish on Amazon.

[cliffwalker62]

I’m reading a book on my voyage because it has X ray.I don’t see it as a gimmick.Still a big Kobo fan though.

[JSWolf]

I like X-ray for Amazon Prime. But I never once wanted it for a book.

[Almamida]

I love it for dense book with lot of characters, like the Game of Thrones books.

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by Almamida

I love it for dense book with lot of characters, like the Game of Thrones books.

I thought I'd seen posts recently from someone who had a custom dictionary for a series, which might serve a similar purpose to x Ray

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by shalym

I just checked, and 7 out of the last 10 books I bought from Amazon had X-Ray enabled. 2 of the 3 that didn't were collections of short stories from long dead authors, and the third was a free self published book.

Note that the books I buy are not generally best sellers, they are a combination of mysteries, science fiction, and biographies.

In that case, is there any indication of who does the work? That, and @Quoth's comment, suggests it is the publisher or author. And the accuracy is the other issue. I haven't tried it. My comments are more based on what I saw with Kobo's version and what I see discussed a little with the X-Ray plugin for calibre.

[Colonel Cathcart]

Originally Posted by PeterT

I thought I'd seen posts recently from someone who had a custom dictionary for a series, which might serve a similar purpose to x Ray

You're probably refering to GOTDict or The Fictionary.

[geek1011]

Originally Posted by Colonel Cathcart

You're probably refering to GOTDict or The Fictionary.

And for GOTDict, I have a port here (MobileRead).

[Cootey]

Although some books may feature curated x-ray content, most that I've encountered have info gathered by software algorithms. From what I've read online and seen for myself, Amazon culls data from Goodreads, Wikipedia, and captures the first sentence when a person's name is mentioned as the bio. It's not often very useful, and it isn't very complete. For example, in the Time Machine by HG Wells, it features London, the Thames, and Egypt as place names, but nothing for the places where the Time Traveller visits. For people, this is Weena's entry: ❝Then I tried talk, and found that her name was Weena, which though I don’t know what it meant, somehow seemed appropriate enough.

Other entries had incomplete sentences.

There is a Windows app called X-ray Builder that authors can use to build robust X-ray entries for books that Amazon hasn't X-ray enabled yet. I don't know how good the software is, but a thread about it in the Kindle forum has been going since 2014.



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