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

[mrscoach]

I know more colleges and universities are going to e-textbooks, especially for their online courses. We NEED a reader for these because it can be hard to read all the time on a computer screen. Not all PDF textbooks support reflow, mine don't, and even if they did they have all sorts of separate boxes of information and charts that would not reflow because of formatting. And these aren't even technical books as such, but books for teacher prep classes.

So, there is a market opening up more and more, and iRex is ignoring it by not allowing zooming of PDFs. I might not get an 800, but if it doesn't get zoom I definitely will take it off my list of possibilities.

[badbob001]

Originally Posted by Shaggy

It's a business decision on the justification regarding what features they support on the lower level device and how many sales that will take away from the upper level one.

If people think the current top ebook reader vendor, amazon, should be nervous about the upcoming highly competitive market landscape, then I don't think a tiny player such as irex can afford to worry about such small matters. I rather believe that Irex is just too resource-strained or mismanaged to timely bring to market the features that we want, than to think that every misstep they have taken to have been a carefully orchestrated plan of self-destruction.

It's always a case of incompetence vs conspiracy and choosing the more realistic scenario.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by badbob001

I rather believe that Irex is just too resource-strained or mismanaged to timely bring to market the features that we want

You do realize that they already have the zoom capability.

It's always a case of incompetence vs conspiracy and choosing the more realistic scenario.

Or "none of the above".

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by badbob001

If people think the current top ebook reader vendor, amazon, should be nervous about the upcoming highly competitive market landscape, then I don't think a tiny player such as irex can afford to worry about such small matters. I rather believe that Irex is just too resource-strained or mismanaged to timely bring to market the features that we want, than to think that every misstep they have taken to have been a carefully orchestrated plan of self-destruction.

It's always a case of incompetence vs conspiracy and choosing the more realistic scenario.

You obviously haven't read through this post. An Irex representative stated that they have not decided on whether to include zoom or not.

[electrotype]

People who don't search and don't read reviews before buying (most of the people) will buy a Kindle or an iPad. Or maybe a Sony, because of the name.

People who do search before buying are the people who could buy the DR800. But they won't buy it because the DR800 doesn't have zooming (and annotation) and those people are actually looking at features before making a purchase!

I hope iRex will enable those features if they see the DR800 doesn't sell well.

[Mr. Goodbar]

Originally Posted by electrotype

People who don't search and don't read reviews before buying (most of the people) will buy a Kindle or an iPad. Or maybe a Sony, because of the name.

People who do search before buying are the people who could buy the DR800. But they won't buy it because the DR800 doesn't have zooming (and annotation) and those people are actually looking at features before making a purchase!

I hope iRex will enable those features if they see the DR800 doesn't sell well.

I actually think that once this hits the best buy stores it's going to crush the sony 900, particularly if they get a demo unit on display. For the same price you get a larger screen in a similar form factor and one that's much more readable. The average book buyer isn't going to focus a lot on zoom or some other features.

I know a lot of you will disagree with that position, but I know many "average" ebook owners and all they do is buy through the standard store and are very happy with that model. They could care less about some of the fancier features or sideloading content. Will that change over time.....probably, but I expect it will take awhile.

[badbob001]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

You obviously haven't read through this post. An Irex representative stated that they have not decided on whether to include zoom or not.

I'll give you that if they had already implemented zoom within their SDK platform and are simply waiting for a business decision on flipping the switch to enable it. But the latest SDK, which is used by both the DR800 and DR1000, does not have zoom implemented which means they are still working on it. If the SDK is feature complete, then we would probably have the next DR1000 firmware already, which their blog said would be available in Q4 of last year.

The annotations feature for the DR800, mentioned as a later update during its late 2009 unveiling, is still missing. The word lookup feature got as far being still existing within screenshots in the current manuals, but is still missing. I would think delaying and cutting out features means they are having problems meeting deadlines. I don't buy the idea that they purposely took out features from the DR800 so as not to take sales from the DR1000. The Kindle and Kindle DX are very much feature equivalent except for the latter's larger and higher resolution screen. It's like arguing that they took out the goto-to-page feature and made the indicator light extra annoying to nudge users to their more expensive offerings.

[badbob001]

Originally Posted by Mr. Goodbar

I actually think that once this hits the best buy stores it's going to crush the sony 900, particularly if they get a demo unit on display. For the same price you get a larger screen in a similar form factor and one that's much more readable. The average book buyer isn't going to focus a lot on zoom or some other features.

I think the DR800's screen alone is enough to crush the PRS900 in a side-by-side comparison. In person, I found the PRS300's clearer screen crushing both the PRS600 and PRS900's.

But I do think a person browsing the readers will find it odd that the DR800's pen can't be used to draw or select text in comparison to the Sony demo units which will most likely have doodles all over the screen from past users.

[Fjaril]

I have been reading scientific pdf documents (DIN A4) on the DR800 and it's possible to read everything, but it is farily small because of the margins which cannot be croped. A zoom would help here...
I have been reading scientific books, usualy the text is very small (again because of the non-cropable margin, but you can read it. Reflow is usually a bad idea because of formula and in some cases just brings every line of a page to the same which then is close to a thick black line - completely useless. Zoom would be cool!
I have been reading a nice short story 'Narrative of the sufferings and adventures of Henderick Portenger' which I found on Google Books, the problem with this text is again the huge margins that can not been taken away. Zooming in would be great!
Concerning reflow:
- As soon as you have a formula, you can forget the reflow, it is simply not working.
- In the scanned text of the above mentioned story it doesn't work either (since it's an image) which means that either your eyes are good enough and you can read it or you don't read the story.

The high resolution of the DR800 and the good contrast allows to read almost everything on it - with young eyes or a magnifying glass ;-)

Apart from that, I am very happy with the device, reading is great and speed is impressive as well and I have not yet charged the battery in 2 weeks....

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by electrotype

People who do search before buying are the people who could buy the DR800. But they won't buy it because the DR800 doesn't have zooming (and annotation) and those people are actually looking at features before making a purchase!

Assuming, of course, that they need zooming and annotation. Not everyone does.

[SCION]

How do you organize content on the 800? Does it allow for folders or collections (using tags)?

As far as crushing any ebook reader, at that price (which is what a casual browser looks at first), it's competing with the iPad as well (along with the Sony 900 and Kindle DX)! Many may find not being able to use a finger to "touch" , like on their phone or iPod Touch (and iPad), awkward, unnatural, and outdated. Those who are tech-savvy understand the reason for lack of finger touching.

Lack of features (found in competitor devices) has already been discussed and dismissed by some.

Yes, I know the screen is much clearer than the Sony devices that have touchscreen. I bought my Sony 900 because nothing on the market offers the feature set that it does, content organization being at the top of the list. I'm always in the market for something significantly new and improved, so I'm not bashing the 800. If I could buy something with a comparable feature set to the Sony 900, greater touchscreen clarity, and quality build, I would likely purchase it.

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by SCION

How do you organize content on the 800? Does it allow for folders or collections (using tags)?

It allows folders if you apply a minor tweak, see Unboxing iRex 800 and first impressions.

[cartesius]

Originally Posted by Xenophon

Reflow fails for PDFs (even fiction!) where the first letter of each chapter is a fancy drop cap. You get all of the text of the chapter except the first letter, followed by the drop-cap at the end.

Reflow as I have seen it on my Sony Reader, at least, insists on breaking at each page-end in the pdf. So what I get is 1.3 pages, .7 of a blank page, etc. This wastes 1/3 of my battery while I'm reading. And I read a lot, so this means recharging days sooner than if it didn't do this.

Reflow fails utterly for any non-fiction that involves tables, maps, images, etc. Think history, economics and public policy, popular science books, cookbooks(!!) and many other examples. All non-professional reading, too.

Please, at a bare minimum, give us at least automatic zoom-away-the-white-space-margins.

Xenophon

You're unhappy with your reader; but before you smash it against the wall ...read this.

Yes, reflowing a pdf page fails in many cases. But you must remember the pdf format was never designed for that; it is almost as difficult a task as reflowing the text on a piece of paper (minus the character recognition). One has to identify each character's proper place, then figure out which word does it belong to and only THEN proceed to reflowing.
Can we build a system that will perform great (drawings, tables, columns, reflow around a picture)? Yes! We'll employ self-learning, adaptive software. Will anything short of a 3 GHz with 4Gb of RAM system perform the operation in a reasonable amount of time? No...
The software that'll run on a less powerful CPU will perform text placement identification based on some guesses made by the software designers - we like to call that heuristics; the better the guess the better the result, but it's always guessing and it will fail in some particular cases.
Your pdf reflow e-reader is based on the Adobe kit, which I'll expect to have similar behavior as the Adobe Reader.

Your drop-cap letter : I doubt it'll go at the end of the chapter but most likely at the end of the page. The same will happen if the first word of the page has larger font that the rest, or there's a drop-cap somewhere else. Why? Because the characters order in the file is not necessarily the order you see on display: plenty pdf-generators will place that drop-cap letter at the end of the page (why? because this way you get to change the font less often - and font changing is a very time consuming operation); to circumvent this one must first extract the text, then sort it according to the original position. Why hasn't Adobe done it properly it's beyond me, since it's easy enough (pViewer does it). Relying on character order within the file to determine position is an enormously bad idea. (They also fail when there is no space char between words..again betting there is a space in, is a bad idea.)

The page break issue: probably Adobe didn't care so much about the devices with a fixed viewport size, such as e-book readers. Their reader simply uses the whole window to display as much as it can and since there is no need to 'flip' the page one cannot realize it's page based. Should you care about this? No. You have right to ask for better. But, please, have some patience, this feature is still in its infancy. There are also some usability challenges posed by this need to avoid 'page waste' but that's a different story.
Also: I don't believe you waste 1/3 of the battery life; think of it this way: without reflow you couldn't have read that page anyway while using the reader.

To my knowledge pictures are reflow friendly: they're simply zoomed. Tables are tough. Take this homework: you have a table that takes the whole width of the original page; please describe how would you like to see it reflowed.
Vector graphics are even tougher: shape recognition would be needed; and we get back to the 3 GHz 4Gb RAM system.

Now that you know more, I hope your reader will survive

that was my 2 cent,
c.

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by cartesius

The page break issue: probably Adobe didn't care so much about the devices with a fixed viewport size, such as e-book readers. Their reader simply uses the whole window to display as much as it can and since there is no need to 'flip' the page one cannot realize it's page based. Should you care about this? No. You have right to ask for better. But, please, have some patience, this feature is still in its infancy. There are also some usability challenges posed by this need to avoid 'page waste' but that's a different story.

Reflowing one page at a time was a design decision on Adobe's part, and I'm not sure they were wrong to do it this way. The big advantage to the per-page approach when the reflowing is done in real time is that the reader has the option to refer back to the original page if the reflow goes wrong. It also allows the app to fail on a page by page basis (e.g. reflowing most pages, but displaying some only in full page mode). However, some of these advantages could be kept without displaying a partial screen, e.g. by having the last screen on one page include reflowed text from the next page - perhaps after a visible page break (e.g. line across the screen).

[Mr. Goodbar]

Originally Posted by SCION

How do you organize content on the 800? Does it allow for folders or collections (using tags)?

As far as crushing any ebook reader, at that price (which is what a casual browser looks at first), it's competing with the iPad as well (along with the Sony 900 and Kindle DX)! Many may find not being able to use a finger to "touch" , like on their phone or iPod Touch (and iPad), awkward, unnatural, and outdated. Those who are tech-savvy understand the reason for lack of finger touching.

Lack of features (found in competitor devices) has already been discussed and dismissed by some.

Yes, I know the screen is much clearer than the Sony devices that have touchscreen. I bought my Sony 900 because nothing on the market offers the feature set that it does, content organization being at the top of the list. I'm always in the market for something significantly new and improved, so I'm not bashing the 800. If I could buy something with a comparable feature set to the Sony 900, greater touchscreen clarity, and quality build, I would likely purchase it.

I agree with your comments, however my "crush" reference was only in regards to the store comparison between the 800 and 900. For the same price you lose some features to the 900, but have a significantly better screen. For the average user I think the screen would tend to trump the features, but everyone's needs are different.

I'll be interested to watch how the iPad and other tablets do in the market. I personally don't want an lcd for my long term reading, but as a cheap portable computer it looks pretty nice. An ipad and an 800 would make a nice travel kit.