So where the heck is the Sony Reader's new firmware?!?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by maggotb0y

February's come and gone... As well as March and soon April. And still no new firmware from Sony.

It's probably run away with the Gen3 firmware upgrade .

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by hekkel

My guess is you have to use the Library application for that, it already has an option to check for updates.

Nope - at least that's not the way it's worked previously. Sure, the Library app tells you that an upgrade is available, but the actual upgrade "package" is a standalone executable which can be separately downloaded and run from Sony's support website.

Which means you need a Windows computer and a registered Library application.

You need a Windows PC, yes, but you don't need to have "registered" your Reader. Remember, the "Connect" software (or whatever it's called these days) can be freely downloaded from Sony's web site by anyone, Reader owner or not.

[kacir]

Regular visitors on this forum know that I do not like the Sony Company.

Yet, after months of careful reading of this forum and months of deliberation I have decided to buy (and import) Sony reader PRS500. That was almost a year ago. And I am a very, very happy owner.

I tell you why there are no firmware updates. The reason is simple. Very simple. The Reader JUST WORKS (Tm).
I know, I know ...
We (the geeks, the power users, the ebook fanatics) want directory support, mobi reader, SW for reading Kindle books, user uploadable font preferences, artificial intelligence that would understand PDF book (A4 or Letter format) and will miraculously reflow it regardless of fancy graphics, multiple text columns and complicated formulas. This kind of firmware update ain't gona happen. There will be no support for those things.

We (the geeks, etc... ) have the "hack builder" for reprogramming of buttons, deleting and copying files, direct page number input and other wonderful things our resident hackers managed to put together. There is even DICTIONARY. Go ahead and check the thread about the dictionary support for Reader. You would think that such a sought-after feature will be discussed in a hundred posts. This is, very surprisingly not the case here.

Sony reader does *everything* the average (non-geek) reader needs or wants.
Period.
- It has got 6" e-ink display
- One charge lasts many thousand pages or at least 14 days (after a YEAR of everyday use!)
- You can continue reading about two seconds after hitting the "power ON" button
- it does not freeze, it does not crash randomly
- it even displays page numbers correctly (unlike some devices (that I shall not name here, ;-) ) featuring Mobi pocket reader)
Try to compare the Sony Reder with other e-ink devices out there.
Compare it to the Iliad, that despite numerous updates drains battery in one day and takes ages to start. Compare it to the Cybook that can not even display page numbers correctly and does not start at the page you were reading when you switched it off.
I know that Iliad and Cybook Gen 3 have many wonderful features but we are talking about the maturity of the [soft|firm]ware. Perhaps Amazon Kindle is comparable to Sony Reader software maturity wise. And Kindle users are not holding their breath for the firmware update either.

Yes.
I am too waiting for the firmware update for PRS 505. Not that I have one, but the update will give our hackers essential information needed for various ingenious hacks for 505. And perhaps that is the reason that there is no update yet.

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by hekkel

If you collect all the available public information I think you can expect an update around mid may, when the IDPF conference is held. It is Adobe who is writing a Digital Editions applications for portable devices and it was Adobe who wrote the PDF viewer for the Sony. Given all the publishers moving towards ePub I guess things will come together at that conference.

So you will probably have to wait until the 14th of may.

It would be really wonderful if Adobe's ace engineering team would fix their support for ligatures to actually work. Adobe's own typography guru is on record as saying that the way Apple handles ligatures in OS X is actually the way it's supposed to work* -- but Adobe Acrobat and Adobe's other .pdf tools produce incorrect spacing with that output.

And let's not forget that the Sony reader displays the wrong glyphs when presented with ligatures in a pdf file. That's Adobe's code too! At least Acrobat shows the glyphs, albeit with broken character spacing.

Xenophon

*Yes, you heard me right. Apple has been following Adobe's spec correctly for seven years now, and Adobe hasn't gotten around to fixing their code to conform to their own specification. Sigh.

[Peter Sorotokin]

Originally Posted by Xenophon

It would be really wonderful if Adobe's ace engineering team would fix their support for ligatures to actually work. Adobe's own typography guru is on record as saying that the way Apple handles ligatures in OS X is actually the way it's supposed to work* -- but Adobe Acrobat and Adobe's other .pdf tools produce incorrect spacing with that output.

And let's not forget that the Sony reader displays the wrong glyphs when presented with ligatures in a pdf file. That's Adobe's code too! At least Acrobat shows the glyphs, albeit with broken character spacing.

Xenophon,

Can you provide the details? In most cases character spacing is burned into the PDF file at creation time, so it may not be possible to fix that in PDF viewer, but showing wrong glyph is bad. Are you saying that Apple's Preview works correctly and Acrobat does not? Also, did you try Digital Editions?

Handling ligatures for EPUB is not at the top of our list, but we plan to do it. (Actually, it is not possible to support some languages, e.g. Arabic or Hindi, without doing ligatures properly, so we'll have to get to it).

Peter

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by Peter Sorotokin

Xenophon,

Can you provide the details? In most cases character spacing is burned into the PDF file at creation time, so it may not be possible to fix that in PDF viewer, but showing wrong glyph is bad. Are you saying that Apple's Preview works correctly and Acrobat does not? Also, did you try Digital Editions?

Handling ligatures for EPUB is not at the top of our list, but we plan to do it. (Actually, it is not possible to support some languages, e.g. Arabic or Hindi, without doing ligatures properly, so we'll have to get to it).

Peter

The reference from your typography guy will take a few days to come up with*. The issue, on the other hand is easy to demonstrate. Here are the steps:

• Take any OS X Mac (with OS 10.4 or newer), and use an application like TextEdit or Pages.
• Pick a font that has ligature support built in. Fi and Fl are good choices to work with.
• Type a string that uses those character sequences. A fine choice would be: "Orville and Wilbur Wright finally managed flight."
• Print this to pdf using Apple's tools (not Acrobat).
• You will see that Apple has automatically used the fi and fl ligatures in the correct places.
• Send the pdf file to a PC, and view it in Acrobat. You'll see the fi and fl ligatures, but the distance from the left-hand edge of the fi to the left-hand edge of the n in "finally" will be the larger distance that would be appropriate if no ligature was used. THIS IS WRONG! Same problem with the fl in flight. And with the 'll's if the font has that ligature too.
  

More specifically, it'll look approximately like fi-ligature followed by about half-a-space followed by "nally". More or less. Really ugly; worse than skipping the ligatures, in fact.

If you send the pdf file to a postscript printer from a Mac everything will look just right. If you send the same file to a postscript printer from a PC it will print with the same bug. Again, this is wrong.

Lastly, if you send the PDF file to a Sony Reader, you won't see the ligature AT ALL. Instead, you'll see either blank space or you'll see some random character that isn't the correct ligature. This latter failure look an awful lot like what happened in the days before OpenType fonts that include all the ligatures in one font file. Back when you had to use the "Foo Professional" or "Foo Extended" font to get the ligatures for the Foo font, you'd see odd characters if you forgot to load the professional/extended fonts along with the base font. I believe that those odd characters were the over-loaded code for the ligature. This also happened with built-in fractions, and other extended-font characters.

In these modern days of OpenType fonts with all the fractions and ligatures and stuff built in to a single font, I would surely hope that no such effect would ever show up ever again. And even with the older fonts that had the ligatures and fractions and swash caps and stuff split out into other fonts, it still ought to work correctly from a PDF which does, after all, include the bloody fonts as needed!

*I think that the book I saw it in had a title like "Computer Typography" or some such. Recent (within the last few years) fat book on "more than you ever wanted to know about typography and computers" by an author described on the cover as "one of Adobe's leading font/typography gurus" (or words to that effect). It's in my office at school, so I won't lay hands on it before Monday at the soonest. And I'm ten days from my Thesis defense, so I may not get to it until after that. I should note that he also pointed out plenty of things that Apple does wrong too! This just happened to be one of the things that they got right.

Xenophon

P.S. If you want to see a really wild version of this effect, use the font Zapfino in a larger type size -- 24-point or so. Zapfino includes a glyph that is a fancy version of the name of the font. So, type "Zapfino is wonderful" in Pages, and watch as the word Zapfino transforms itself into the fancy glyph. Then move the resulting pdf file around, and watch the spacing be screwed up as above. Experimenting quickly, I see that the word "Zapfino" at 24-point is 1.5 inches wide with ligatures forced to OFF (plus an scoosh for the overhanging tail of the trailing o). With ligatures ON, the Zapfino glyph is a bit less than 2 inches wide, plus a little bit for an overhanging tail from the o and the swash underneath. That should really mess up the spacing!

[mollybo]

I'd rather Sony fix the horrible Connect software than get a firmware upgrade. I'm pretty bitter about the software timing out when I'm trying to search for a book.

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by mollybo

I'd rather Sony fix the horrible Connect software than get a firmware upgrade. I'm pretty bitter about the software timing out when I'm trying to search for a book.

That's probably the web site, not the software. Still, it is Sony's software and it should be more responsive.

[Xenophon]

And a great big to Peter Sorotokin for a fast response to a grumpy message about Adobe and PDFs and ligatures! I sent some karma his way. There'll be more if the problems get fixed. Or if they get dumped to Apple, or Microsoft, or Sony, or whoever should be doing the fixing.
to Peter!

Xenophon

[Roy White]

Kacir is right. The Sony 500 is almost totally perfect. The only thing i want with a firmware update is a folder system to put books in at the top menu instead of the flat file system.

[bobbyco57]

Originally Posted by Roy White

Kacir is right. The Sony 500 is almost totally perfect. The only thing i want with a firmware update is a folder system to put books in at the top menu instead of the flat file system.

Perfect indeed, but of course no software is ever finished

Just wanted to chime in and add to the thread length of happy readers knowing their devices are going to keep up with the times.

[CO'Neil]

Well, I certainly have gotten more hours of entertainment out of my 500 than any other toy I can recall since Legos, when I was four years old.

Sony's "eBook Library" connection software is the buggiest thing I ever do run on my home computer, hanging every so often and taking its time to scan the 2gig memory chip prior to file transfers. And the 500 does once in a while need a hard re-boot or just decide to do so itself for some reason.

But overall, rather to my surprise, the dang thing still ain't broke! Maybe it won't, either, and I'll have to buy a 505 to go along with it, just to check out the "improved" screen contrast.

I'll be impressed if Sony does stay in the e-reader game at all over the long term, since I figured their real goal was mainly a chunk of the DRM market and the spectacular Kovid Goyal software has, for me, blown that out of the water. Over the years though I've bought a few Sony one-off products like the ICF-2010 and SW-1 that remain fun to play with even now.

For sure, if they do stop production, I'd need a spare or two at least.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by kacir

Compare it to the Cybook that ... does not start at the page you were reading when you switched it off.

Er, no, it starts at the library screen, with your current book selected, from where it takes 1 button press to get back to where you were. This is BETTER than "starting on the page you were reading" if you have several books on the go at once.

My biggest issue with the Sony is lack of dictionary support. When I owned a Sony I didn't think this was a big deal. Having used a machine WITH a dictionary for the last 6 months, however, I now find it an essential feature.

[AprilHare]

How do i install the latest firmware anyway (once it's released)?

My guess is you have to use the Library application for that, it already has an option to check for updates. Which means you need a Windows computer and a registered Library application. Something you can only achieve by committing fraud if you're not resident in the US. (You really have to check that checkbox in 2.0 or select either US or Canada in version 2.1).

Rest assured, you can update the firmware for your Sony Reader despite not being a US resident. The Sony software works whether you are or not (and there are no such checkmarks of which you speak). That only comes in with respect to the Sony Store. Actually Sony is quite polite to non-US citizens (except for the no Sony Store and no limited warranty thing).

[AprilHare]

I tend to suspect the Sony firmware, not the Sony software nor hardware, with respect to the crashes associated with large eBook collections. I use a 8 GB memory stick* (which indeed supports quite a large collection of eBooks) and it is, as you say, very buggy after disconnection. My routine comes down to:
1) Download the eBooks to the Sony Reader.
2) Discover the 'non-circling spinning arrows', followed by endless reboots and more 'non-circling spinning arrows'.
2a) Panic.
3) Remove the memory stick during a reboot. If no reboot, madly press the Reset button (which seems more like a 'Free Beer' button sometimes) and hopefully induce one.
4) Reinsert the Memory Stick and quickly reconnect the Reader to the PC running the Sony software.
5) Disconnect the Reader, then hopefully the Reader starts again recompiling the contents of the memory stick..
6) Wait 20 minutes or so, keeping an eagle eye on the Reader just in case it jams again.
7) Hopefully it finishes, showing that new book goodness. If not, go back to 2a.
8) Get used to waiting longer and longer for menus to load, saving bookmarks and getting used to scrolling hundreds of pages of books one slow click at a time...

Yes, a new firmware revision is needed.

*Yes, the 8 GB memory stick is supported by the Sony Reader (despite what the Sony Reader packaging said, greater than 4 GB indeed works).